Of interest to scholars of Austrian literature and history but not to a general reading audience.
The troubled life of Hugo Huppert (1902-1982), a respected but largely forgotten Austrian writer and communist.
When George Huppert (Emeritus, History/Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; The Style of Paris: Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment, 1999, etc.) began researching Hugo, it was because he, like the author's own father, was an Austrian Jew born in 1902, a time marked by growing anti-Semitism. Rather than attempt to find connections between the two families, however, the author was drawn into the tangled life story Huppert told in his autobiography and other writings he left behind. The son of middle-class parents, Huppert—who early on revealed a gift and penchant for writing—had an idyllic childhood and adolescence. His life changed dramatically after he moved to Vienna in the 1920s. There, Huppert joined the Communist Party and experienced the political upheavals that came in the aftermath of the Austrian empire, including the rise of Hitler in Germany. As much as he wanted to immerse himself in the Viennese literary scene, however, Huppert found himself putting his political work before his own artistic endeavors. In the late 1920s, he went to Moscow, where he taught and also continued to engage in activities as “political culture worker” for the Soviet Communist Party. Imprisoned and then freed during the Stalin purges, Huppert could not return to Hitler-controlled Austria until 1945. At that time, the Communist Party sent him there to oversee political activities only to recall him four years later for conducting an illicit affair with a local girl. The narrative is slim and limited in its scope, but the author is strongest in his focus on his subject’s struggle between his literary/artistic ambitions and his need for security after years of grueling, often bitter unrest. A loyal Communist Party member until his death, Huppert found peace but only after submitting to ideological forces greater than himself.
Of interest to scholars of Austrian literature and history but not to a general reading audience.Pub Date: May 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-253-01978-3
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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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