An essential companion to the ongoing reissue campaign, courtesy of the New York Review of Books, of Grossman’s work in...
Comprehensive biography of the great Soviet war correspondent, novelist, and dissident.
As a young man, Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) ignored advice to change his patronymic from Solomonovich to Semyonovich, embracing his Jewish heritage in a time of pogroms. He was skeptical about the Bolshevik Revolution, writing in his novel Everything Flows, “in February 1917, the path of freedom lay open for Russia. Russia chose Lenin.” Yet, as Moscow-born journalist and historian Popoff (Tolstoy’s False Disciple: The Untold Story of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov, 2014, etc.) writes, Grossman weathered tuberculosis and unsatisfying work as a chemist (not in that alone does he resemble the Italian writer Primo Levi) to embark on a literary career. An early novel presaged themes he would follow in later works, namely the sameness of different totalitarian systems; the similarities between Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes would emerge in several of his pieces, which did not endear him to the authorities. He traveled with units of the Red Army throughout World War II as a war correspondent, getting into the thick of Stalingrad, Kursk, and, later, Berlin, providing some of the best reportage on any theater of the war: “The dead sleep on the hills,” he wrote of Stalingrad, “near the ruins of factory workshops, in gullies and ravines; they sleep in places where they fought….Sacred land!” His novel Life and Fate, which preoccupied him for years, captured those experiences while repeating his mistrust of totalitarianism. Amazingly, he was not executed, but he constantly ran afoul of Soviet authorities and often endured their “administrative violence.” As Popoff notes in closing, Grossman remains little known in Russia today, in part because of historical amnesia and in part because Vladimir Putin, “who is striving to re-create the Soviet police state," does not brook criticism of Stalin or any equation of Stalinism and Hitlerism.
An essential companion to the ongoing reissue campaign, courtesy of the New York Review of Books, of Grossman’s work in English and of interest to students of literature, journalism, and history alike.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-22278-4
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2019
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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