David Benioff is a fiction writer born in New York. His first book The 25th Hour was released in 2000 and kicked off his career as a talented fiction writer; however, Benioff published City of Thieves in 2006 which took him over five years to finish.
I believe this book closely relates to the central question “Are people of the world more alike than different, or more different than alike?” This because in the story, two very different characters, Lev a Russian Jew and Kolya a Russian soldier, meet because of very unfavorable circumstances, and both must assist each other in order to stay alive.
This closely relates to the central question because this entire story is based on two opposite young men who have to defy the odds of being different to come together and survive through a very cold, Russian Leningrad during World War II. Both being arrested for very separate reasons, must join forces to obtain a dozen eggs for Colonel Grechko, who has his eye set on baking a grand cake for his daughter’s wedding. Although, if Lev and Kolya fail the seemingly impossible mission, they will both be wanted as war criminals in Russia and arrested and brutally killed immediately.
As I summarized in a brief commentary of the book, I think that this relates best to central question one, because WWII is basically a question of what makes every individual of the world different or alike. These two completely different young men have to work together for a common goal: life. In order to accomplish this, they must put their differences aside and realize that they are both fighting for the same thing. Which basically correlates to the rest of WWII, everyone put aside their differences and fought for the one thing we all had in common…the need to survive.
johndoeanonymous 