In 1942, an ordinary, German-born girl named Anne Frank decided to begin a diary. "It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary," she wrote in the third entry of the little book. "[It] seems to me that neither I--nor for that matter anyone else--will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl." Just weeks after she began to write in her diary, Anne and her family were forced to flee from their home and seek shelter in a hidden annex; the Frank family was Jewish, and their survival depended on their ability to evade capture by the Nazis. Two years of living confined in the tiny annex with seven other people and coping with the constant fear of death transformed this "ordinary" teenager into an extraordinary young woman, and the collection of her recorded thoughts into one of the most studied testimonies of the...