A fascinating, deeply thoughtful and researched study that contributes mightily to the ongoing humanist debate.
Sober, trenchant exploration of the need for settling the crimes of the Soviet Union with history.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, yet a proper reckoning over its 73 years of totalitarianism has not yet been achieved, writes Hudson Institute senior fellow Satter (Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, 2003, etc.). Reflecting his own visits to Russia, the author looks at various facets of Russian society with an eye on the Soviet past—e.g., national monuments, textbooks, the election of Vladimir Putin and rehabilitation of many of Soviet leaders—and he questions why a moral reflection has not penetrated very deeply. Many Russians look back at the Soviet era as a time of solidity and security, when everyone had jobs and were taken care of by the state, and the Soviet Union was perceived as powerful. The election of Putin has reinforced a dangerous tilt toward nostalgia, as one of his first acts when assuming power in 2000 was to restore a plaque commemorating his former KGB boss, Yuri Andropov, the “cold-blooded” autocrat. Even though the crimes of the Soviet regime eventually became known to the people, the dossiers of KGB informers were swiftly closed by law in 1992, and President Yeltsin’s attempts to ban the Communist Party in 1994 were largely foiled. Putin’s proposal to reintroduce the Soviet national anthem “enabled Russians to be proud of the Soviet-era achievements,” but without the essential moral introspection. Throughout Satter’s journeys across Russia, he witnessed the struggle between forces of remembrance and forgetting.
A fascinating, deeply thoughtful and researched study that contributes mightily to the ongoing humanist debate.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-300-11145-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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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