An unusual record of the Cold War which shows that the veterans of the intellectual war were often as brave and determined as the soldiers and spies. Urban was one of that glittering group of European intellectuals, some of them former Communists, who understood that the Cold War was as much an intellectual and moral struggle as a fight for power. Born in Hungary, he arrived in Britain after the end of the WW II, was associated with the magazine Encounter and the BBC European Service, and in the early 1980s became director of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Today, with the outcome of the ideological struggle a matter of history, it's useful to be reminded by Urban that the outcome was often in doubt—that there were times when it could be bad for one's career prospects to be known as an anti-Communist, when it was seriously asserted that the West was as bad as the Soviet Union, and when the prospect of the Soviet Union outstripping the West was widely canvassed. Urban found the ``moral neutrality, and often direct hostility, of an opinion-making segment of the American intelligentsia . . . a more serious hindrance to our work'' than anything the Soviets could contrive. The radio stations operated within tight constraints: They were not allowed to call for revolution in Soviet-dominated nations, for example (a reflection in part of a serious misjudgment during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which Urban goes into at length). Nor could they call for the dismemberment of the Soviet empire, whatever its tensions and crimes. And some of the most distinguished critics of the Soviets were intermittently barred from the airwaves by the station's management, in gestures of ``near- appeasement.'' Passionate, courageous, balanced in its assessments, Urban's book is filled with some wise and highly original reflections on the greatest conflict of our times.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-06921-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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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