A concise yet powerful contribution to an even larger history.
A convincing argument that theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his often overlooked brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi “deserve to be remembered together” for their courageous resistance to Hitler's Nazi regime.
Sifton (The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in the Times of Peace and War, 2003) and Stern (University Professor Emeritus/Columbia Univ.; Five Germanys I Have Known, 2006, etc.) have unique vantage points. Stern's parents were friends of Bonhoeffer, and he remains a friend to the children of Bonhoeffer's sister. Sifton's father, famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, was also a friend and colleague. Both were active opponents of Hitler from the beginning. Bonhoeffer had won an international standing working against the Aryanization of churches in the 1930s. Dohnanyi attempted to help people targeted by the regime and began to compile a chronological record, together with documentation of Nazi crimes, for use after the regime fell. While working in counterintelligence, he recruited Bonhoeffer to join with him and his sister Christine in what the authors call “their conspiracy against the state.” Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were subsequently involved in organizing the March 1943 plots against Hitler. Held for two years under appalling conditions, they were executed less than a month before the end of the war, as were other members of their extended families. Particularly powerful are the quotations from letters and communications from jail. The authors quote from a letter Christine wrote in September 1945: “I believe it is better to know for what one dies than not to know what exactly one is living for.” Sifton and Stern answer the question about whether Bonhoeffer has been remembered correctly and also discuss both men’s unsuccessful attempts to reach out to the Allies for support.
A concise yet powerful contribution to an even larger history.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59017-681-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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