A sketch of the writer, but one with crisp lines and sure-handed strokes.
The life of celebrated essayist, novelist, poet and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919–1987), told in swift succinctness by the author of such philosophical and historical works as Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence (2009).
Lang (Emeritus, Philosophy/SUNY, Albany) approaches this entry in the publisher’s Jewish Lives series from a variety of perspectives. He presents the facts of Levi’s life but also looks closely at his writings, philosophy and identity as a Jew. Lang organizes his text in a way both playful and educative: His first chapter is “The End,” and the preface comes at the end. The author begins with the controversy surrounding Levi’s death—suicide or no? (Lang says yes.) Then he carries us back to 1943 and Levi’s arrest by the Nazis in Italy and his transport to Auschwitz. Lang offers some Italian history and notes that the tiny Jewish population of Italy tended to support Mussolini—at first. After the war, Levi began writing, and Lang takes us through several of the works, observing that Levi had admired the writing of Jack London and that his relationship with Elie Wiesel was uneasy. He continually reminds us of Levi’s education as a chemist and the jobs in the chemical industry he held. He shows the considerable influence of chemical training on Levi’s The Periodic Table (1975). A tricky chapter is the one he devotes to Levi’s Jewishness. The author argues that Levi’s later contention that the Holocaust accentuated that identity is a bit disingenuous: Levi was immersed in the Jewish secular world before the war. He’d been an early supporter of Zionism but not for himself. Lang’s philosophical bent emerges clearly in his chapter about Levi’s thought, and he discusses five aspects of it, including thoughts about human nature, justice and God.
A sketch of the writer, but one with crisp lines and sure-handed strokes.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-13723-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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