FRIDAY: Anne Frank, plus two others!

FRIDAY, MARCH 20, 2026

What Yevtushenko said: When we drop in at the medical mission, we treat it as a reading experience. (There tends to be a lot of sitting around.)

Today, we turned to the book we couldn't find a few weeks ago, and we pondered a present-day problem. We're forced to admit a semi-embarrassing fact:

By our reckoning, that book still strikes us as possibly the most interesting book we've ever read. 

Your reaction won't likely be the same. Be that as it may, the volume in question is this:

Anne Frank:
The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
By Francine Prose
HarperCollins Publishers, 2009

We know, we know—we're wearing you out! That said, Prose began her text with this quotation from John Berryman, who was no one's idea of a dummy:

I would call the subject of Anne Frank’s Diary even more mysterious and fundamental than St. Augustine’s, and describe it as the conversion of a child into a person….

That brief clip comes from Berryman's 1967 essay, The Development of Anne Frank. 

This morning, when we read that opening line, we thought of two present day persons. We thought of the people who, just this past week, sat on our nation's most-watched "cable news" program and proceeded to compare James Talarico, first to a well-known deranged mass murderer, then to the apparently deluded leader of a religious cult.

(The first person said that Talarico gives him "Ted Bundy vibes." The second person called Talarico "a terrifying child," then compared him to David Koresh.)

What makes someone a person? Tomorrow, we'll offer transcripts of the fuller remarks by those two present-day people.

Prose's book still sweeps us away. So does the silence of Blue America's AWOL elites—the silence we've often mentioned.

As Prose begins to write in her own voice, she offers this:

The first time I read The Diary of Anne Frank I was younger than its author was when, at the age of thirteen, she began to write it... 

In the summer of 2005, I read the diary once more. I had just begun making notes for a novel that, I knew, would be narrated in the voice of a thirteen-year-old girl. Having written a book suggesting that writers seek guidance from a close and thoughtful reading of the classics, I thought I should follow my own advice, and it occurred to me that the greatest book ever written about a thirteen-year-old girl was Anne Frank's diary.

Prose moves on (and on) from there, with the astounding back-story of a very well-known unknown book and its precocious young author, who was actually fifteen when her project was stopped.

What does that have to do with those other two people? We won't try to answer that question.

Tomorrow, we'll record what those two people actually said. Along the way, we urge you to remember this:

No people are uninteresting.

So Yevtushenko said.