Authoritative, cogent, and compelling account of the upheavals in Eastern Europe. Stokes (History/Rice; Politics as Development, 1990, etc.—not reviewed) blends meticulous research and narrative drive, covering Communism's weary decline after 1968 with an epic sweep that takes in not only such expected landmarks as the Prague Spring, the birth of Solidarity, and the entrance of Mikhail Gorbachev, but also myriad telltale incidents of tension and dissension from Budapest to Bucharest. The author renders a full and damning account of Communism's economic failure, but he steers clear of economic determinism, treating economic collapse as a necessary but insufficient cause for the political earthquake. Ideology is the real battleground here, its heroes the leading figures of the late 70's dissident movements—both celebrated figures like Havel, Walesa, and Adam Michnik, and less familiar ones like the Bulgarian poet Blaga Dimitrova. These humanist ``antipoliticians'' confronted their oppressors' moral and political bankruptcy with their own efforts to ``live in truth'' (Havel's term)—to recover the cultural integrity of their countries in the creation of a parallel civil society that, when the moment came, was ready to accept the mantle of legitimacy. Stokes recounts these dissident struggles with obvious admiration, yet always objectively, and with an eye for the telling detail or the grimly humorous—such as abandoned Trabant automobiles ``spring[ing] up each morning like mushrooms'' in summer 1989 on Eastern European streets, discarded by their asylum-seeking East German owners. The author discerns a grand historical narrative, too—the eventual victory of enlightened democratic pluralism in a three-cornered ideological contest with ``antirationalism'' (fascism) and ``hyperrationalism'' (Stalinism). But there's no trite cold war triumphalism here—a bleak and cautionary last chapter describing Yugoslavia's plummet into bloody civil war is a reminder that, throughout Europe, the lifting of Communism has also unleashed atavistic nationalist passions that could yet imperil freedom. With magisterial command, Stokes does full justice to his momentous subject.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-506644-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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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