A lively, albeit not very scholarly, account of Jan Karski's role in the WW II Polish underground. From the very first chapter (which opens in August 1939), Tennessee journalist Wood and Polish journalist Jankowski glamorously build Karski, a Catholic Pole, into a hero by circumstance. The 25-year-old Karski, an aspiring diplomat and a lieutenant in the Polish Army, was traveling by train in his native land when the Blitzkrieg hit. Abandoning his boxcar, Karski wandered eastward until he literally bumped into Soviet forces, who captured and imprisoned him. From then on, the text recounts one exciting escapade after another during Karski's years of service as a secret agent for the Polish underground. As a chronological and factual account, this has many problems. Karski—on whose oral reminiscences the book is largely based—is the most fortunate of heroes, always one step ahead of the enemy, who is sometimes the Soviets and sometimes the Germans. (The Allied governments, which did not comprehend the dire straits of wartime Poland, come across almost as badly.) As it recounts Karski's diplomatic struggles to aid the Polish underground and to inform VIPs about the plight of Polish Jewry, the book offers little hard data, detail, or additional sources to substantiate his own account of his actions. The authors additionally fail to analyze any of the highly significant events in which Karski participated (including his role in smuggling out of Poland reports of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto). They portray Karski in broad strokes as a superhero: a man with unswerving goals, nerves of steel, and no apparent personal needs; a diehard diplomat in moral conflict with everyone but himself. It must be admitted, though, that their oversimplified saga is a real page-turner, with drama woven into every scene and an abundance of enjoyable anecdotes. Shallow, but exciting all the same. (8 pages of photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-01856-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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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