by Franci Rabinek Epstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Further useful testimony from an unspeakably terrifying era.
A Holocaust memoir by a secular Czechoslovakian Jew who was 22 when she was rounded up with her family to be deported to Terezín in 1942—only the first step of her wartime misery.
Epstein (1920-1989) wrote this brief, striking memoir in the mid-1970s, largely for the benefit of her children. Her daughter, Helen Epstein (The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma, 2017, etc.), a writer who struggled her entire life to grasp her mother’s awful wartime experiences and her own trauma as the child of Holocaust survivors, could not face returning to it until recently. Here, she does a fine job of clarifying some of the detail and characters. A youthful zest for life comes through despite “Franci’s” many travails. She demonstrates a fierce determination to adapt and prevail amid the harshest conditions. First, she watched as her parents, middle-class members of the German-speaking community in Prague, were brutally separated from her at Terezín to be sent to the Nazi death camps. Life in the barracks of Terezín was fraught but bearable, and Franci keenly observes the hierarchy of survival, where the well-connected enjoyed benefits not available to all, and “a whole new standard of behavior evolved, much of it self-sacrificing and noble, but also frequently selfish and amoral.” Married hastily to a young man from home who was able to help them survive by his canny trading instincts, until he was caught and disappeared, Franci was herded into the cattle cars for transport to Auschwitz in May 1944. There, her cousin made her aware of what was burning in the chimneys; she “became conscious of a peculiar odor in the air, like burning hair or bones.” From then on, the author refers to herself by her camp tattoo number, A-4116, and she chronicles how she endured the brutal conditions and disease at several women’s camps by using her sewing and electrical skills.
Further useful testimony from an unspeakably terrifying era.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313557-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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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