Letters exchanged between 1928 and 1940 by two prominent German intellectuals and scholars of literature, music, and culture, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, now published in their entirety for the first time in English. Benjamin’s and Adorno’s first meeting in 1923 in Frankfurt sparked in each a strong interest in the other’s intellectual pursuits, and eventually led to a dedicated friendship that endured through difficult years of exile. Their exchange continued until Benjamin’s suicide in the Pyrenees, provoked by the threat of forced deportation to Nazi-controlled France. As each correspondent held the other’s professional opinion in high esteem, both spend many pages discussing current research, criticizing each other’s manuscripts, and reviewing the latest academic publications. Their letters help to trace the shaping of such significant projects as Benjamin’s work on Kafka and Baudelaire and Adorno’s on Wagner and jazz, and command respect for their erudition in a wide range of fields, from philosophy to modern culture. As first names eventually replace “Herr Wiesengrund” and “Herr Benjamin,— the letters shed more light on the personalities and daily preoccupations of the two friends, who shared the problems of immigrant life (for Adorno in London and later the US, for Benjamin in France). We learn about their efforts to publish their work and earn money and recognition in a foreign culture. Benjamin reveals concerns about his son Stefan’s mental health and his adventures in procuring a dwelling place in Paris. Adorno, on the other hand, frequently helps his friend with contacts and recommendations, including the arrangements for Benjamin’s abortive immigration to America. Finally, the imminent political cataclysm in their native Germany, particularly the situation of the Jews, sets the worried tone of their later correspondence. While the absence of a comprehensive editorial introduction outlining major landmarks in their biographies and careers is unfortunate, these letters do let Benjamin and Adorno speak eloquently for themselves on many complex issues.
Pub Date: Dec. 10, 1999
ISBN: 0-674-15427-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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