To say that the Holocaust or the African-American experience with slavery is "unspeakable," notes Mandel (English, U. of Rhode Island), is to partake of a "rhetorical invocation of the limits of language, comprehension, representation, and thought on the one hand, and a deferential gesture toward atrocity, horror, trauma, and pain, on the other." She criticizes this invocation of the unspeakable as being complicit in the abnegation of cognitive agency and establishment and maintenance of cognitive limits that preclude needed understanding of atrocities. Out of this perspective comes a reading practice towards representations of atrocity that she hopes is more ethically and critically productive. She demonstrates the practice through readings of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Elie Wiesel's Night, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Wiliam Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)