A masterful, beguiling account of an extraordinary man.
Wyatt (A Small Town’s Sacrifices, 2012, etc.) recounts the remarkable life of a Belgian patriot in this biography.
At the opening of this book, 10-year-old Josse Flasschoen attends a military parade with his family in 1901. At the sight of the soldiers on horseback, he declares to his mother, “I am proud to be a Belgian!” Soon afterward, he gets in a minor tussle with a policeman who used too much force while trying to keep spectators off the street. This strong sense of patriotism and intolerance for injustice remained with Flasschoen throughout his life. The biography’s first section examines its subject’s time in the Belgian Congo; the second looks at his involvement in World War II; and the third considers his legacy. At 20, Flasschoen was sent by the Belgian government to the newly acquired colony in the Belgian Congo. There, he established a successful palm oil plantation and gained the respect of many native people, whom he deeply respected, as well. They gave him the playful tribal moniker “Ndekendek”: “the man who runs like a bird.” Later, the palm oil trade slumped, and Josse and his family returned to Belgium in 1933. As World War II grew closer, Flasschoen worked undercover for French intelligence, investigating German invasion plans. On May 10, 1940, German planes filled the skies above Brussels, and Flasschoen knew that his life would be irrevocably changed. Overall, this is a complex, richly detailed story—a biography that’s as captivating as historical fiction. The author shows rare skill at evocatively describing settings in very few words: “The heat was unbearable, especially around the noon hour and early afternoon….It was also when flies fiercely buzzed around people, black or white, and the animals.” He also creates penetrating psychological profiles of various figures, and he provides well-researched historical data. The archival photographs included throughout the text bring the story even further to life. Anyone with an interest in early-20th-century European history, or World War II in particular, will relish this book.
A masterful, beguiling account of an extraordinary man.Pub Date: April 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-1430-1
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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