An immensely readable literary account of eccentric, memorable characters.
Having dealt with four generations of his famous family in Fathers and Sons (2007, etc.), Waugh delves into another quirky, brilliant, ill-starred clan.
The author is quite taken with the messy, convoluted genealogy of Vienna’s Wittgenstein family, enormously wealthy industrialists, philanthropists and artists. He focuses on the nine children of maverick entrepreneur Karl Wittgenstein, who in defiance of a difficult father forged a career as a wildly successful steel magnate. Waugh begins and ends with his evident favorite among the siblings: Paul, the artistic middle child, who lost an arm in World War I and nonetheless went on to become a famous pianist. All the siblings were marvelously musical, perhaps, Waugh speculates, as a means of communicating with their diffident mother. Three of Paul’s older brothers—Hans, Rudolf and Kurt—committed suicide, possibly as a result of their “sulphurous” relationship with their father, while youngest son Ludwig became a philosopher of cult status. Sister Hermine, the eldest, remained unmarried and tended the flame at the Wittgensteins’ Vienna homestead, writing a sanitized family memoir in her old age. Gretl married a rich American who succumbed to syphilitic psychosis and lost much of his fortune in the 1929 stock-market crash. Helene married a pillar of the Austrian Protestant establishment and had many children. In direct, thematic chapters, the author leads readers through family tragedies and crumbling of the old order, culminating in the Anschluss of 1938. Raised as Catholics and vaguely anti-Semitic, the now-middle-aged siblings were horrified to learn that three grandparents who had converted to Christianity cut no ice with the Nazis, who classified them all as “full Jews.” Led by well-connected Gretl, they collectively had to sign away much of their fortune in order to stay out of prison. Their opulent world, recaptured by Waugh in digestible, appealing biographical segments, was gone for good.
An immensely readable literary account of eccentric, memorable characters.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52060-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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