A page-turning account of the courageous actions of a woman recognized in 1985 by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
Resurrected from obscurity, the life of a remarkable Brussels-born woman who used her prominent status in Nazi-occupied Paris to shelter orphaned Jewish children.
In a dogged work of research, Nelson (Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, 2009, etc.), a playwright journalist who teaches at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, illuminates the brave and tragically short life of Suzanne Spaak, nee Lorge, whose dangerous work hiding and finding shelter for Jewish orphans during the war in Paris brought imprisonment and death in 1944. As the daughter of one of Belgium’s leading financiers, Spaak was in the right place when the Germans invaded in June 1940. Inhabiting a beautiful apartment in the Palais Royal full of artwork by the family’s protégé painter Renée Magritte, the Spaaks, though unofficially separated (her husband was living with another woman), were in a unique position to aid the Solidarité network, which provided aid to Jews being rounded up, arrested, and deported to concentration camps. It was Suzanne, however, who took her work helping with forged documents to a new and dangerous level, co-founding an organization called the National Movement Against Racism in 1941. Working with various churches, she and her colleagues knocked on doors to spread the word about the roundups, soliciting money from her rich friends and even her famous neighbor, Colette. In the many Paris orphanages, Jewish children were in constant danger of being rounded up, and Spaak did the underground work of creating papers for them and secreting them out to homes in the countryside. Spaak’s story is all the more poignant because of the role her own husband played in obscuring her legacy after the war, and Nelson does a valiant job of bringing together the complex threads of this story.
A page-turning account of the courageous actions of a woman recognized in 1985 by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0532-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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