Bears faithful, sensitive witness to the centuries’ dire impact on Eastern Europe. (Photographs, family tree, map, not seen)
Short-story author Brkic (Stillness, 2003) combines a stirring, elegiac memoir of time spent picking up the dreadful remains of recent Balkan history with an exploration into her grandmother’s life in the region.
Names like Tuzla and Srebrenica send shivers down the spines of even those without a clue about where those towns sit on the fault lines of new Eastern Europe. Evil things happened there, the fallout of something sour and hoary among Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Slavonians, and Bosnians, and it was Brkic’s job as a volunteer American field archaeologist to recover the remains of people who had been killed and dropped into graves, mass and otherwise. Seven thousand died in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 alone, so there was plenty of work for her, as well as the pathologists, anthropologists, and the band of armed protectors accompanying them. Brkic had other matters to attend to as well; her paternal grandmother had lived in the area, and the author retells a grim story of internal exile and young widowhood, arrest for harboring a Jewish man during WWII, striving to stay put on shaky ground during the time of Tito vs. Stalin. That same ground shakes Brkic as well: she washes bones that have been delicately excavated, or dries clothes in hopes that they may be identified and a family’s hopes laid to rest. Once her group recovers a rare letter from a remain; it had gone through the wash, and a co-worker brought it to her “cradled in the palm of his hand like an injured bird.” The author displays a dark temperament in her narrative—hardly surpassing, given its content—and though meeting family members and finding a lover slightly lighten her load, she is finally undone by the horror of it all.
Bears faithful, sensitive witness to the centuries’ dire impact on Eastern Europe. (Photographs, family tree, map, not seen)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-20774-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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