A skillful and illuminating way of presenting, to wonderful effect, the cultural, political, and personal history of a year...
Among innumerable turning points in history, 1947, just two years after World War II ended, is a year worth review. Åsbrink’s book, translated from the Swedish, makes some of that year’s neglected history and high drama tangible and meaningful.
With a technique reminiscent of John Dos Passos’ “newsreels,” the author records events from across the world (Paris, Palestine, New York, Los Angeles, Budapest, Berlin, Delhi, etc.), using the present tense to create a sense of immediacy. During this year, Primo Levi is 28 and living in Turin, and 56-year-old Nelly Sachs is in Stockholm. Christian Dior arouses global grievance with his “New Look,” and Arnold Schoenberg creates a new musical form. Unreformed Nazis make their unimpeded way to South America, where they freely publish and deny the Holocaust. The Jewish Irgun fights the British in Palestine. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Arab League vehemently reject the U.N. partition plan. More than 4,500 displaced men, women, and children aboard the Exodus are turned away from the Holy Land. The Muslim Brotherhood began to flourish as the Marshall Plan took shape. Chuck Yeager flies faster than sound, and Britain, as it departs the subcontinent, carves Pakistan from India. It is a time when the British Empire diminishes and the Cold War flourishes. In an account that serves as the core of her book, the author’s father makes his way from deprivation and danger to safety. Throughout the book, Åsbrink artfully selects her narratives. Though romantic Anglophiles will not find a report of the marriage of Philip and Elizabeth, the love story of Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren is more intriguing (“they set their own rules for their transatlantic love, beyond convention and the law”).
A skillful and illuminating way of presenting, to wonderful effect, the cultural, political, and personal history of a year that changed the world.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-896-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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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