Lucidly told with deeply etched personality sketches, thanks to the author’s use of her teenage diary, now in the U.S....
Besieged Jews are saved by the most unlikely of heroes in Kramer’s Holocaust memoir.
The author was 12 in 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin Pact divided up Poland and the Soviets marched into her hometown of Zolkiew, near Lvov. Her loving, comfortable family was soon broken up by the brutal NKVD, which arrested her grandfather and all other former Polish officers. He probably died in the chaos following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which ended the pact and brought even more terrible times to Zolkiew. Abetted by native Poles and Ukrainians, the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Gestapo rousted the town’s Jews from their homes, deported and murdered them. Her desperate father and two neighbors built a crawl space under one of their houses, but then all Jews were ordered to relocate to the ghetto, which they knew meant certain death. Astonishingly, a man named Beck, a Pole who was an ethnic German—as well as a vocal anti-Semite, an adulterer and a drunk—agreed to help them. He requested the home with the crawl space (the Nazis allotted fellow Aryans the property of displaced Jews), spread a rumor that they had fled and hid the beset, disoriented families beneath the floor of the little house. Cramped and crowded, the grimy bunker was just four-feet high until someone dug a hole in which to stand erect. Among the rules—no talking, no complaining. In their burrow, they could hear boots, gunfire, shouted orders and last cries. They heard the trainmen and German soldiers billeted in the rooms above them. Throughout all this, Beck, often with a bottle in his hand, was constant and kind, providing food and protection for a year and a half. Kramer’s sister did not survive. Neither did 99 out of every 100 Jews in Zolkiew. But this surprisingly honorable, truly righteous man saved Kramer and 17 others. The number 18, it should be noted, signifies “life” in the Jewish tradition.
Lucidly told with deeply etched personality sketches, thanks to the author’s use of her teenage diary, now in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.Pub Date: April 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-172860-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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