A gripping page-turner that thrills like fiction.
The story of desperate East Germans crossing over, digging under, and crashing through the Berlin Wall.
Using interviews, recently declassified State Department files, unreleased film footage, and Stasi archives, Mitchell (Atomic Cover-up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made, 2012, etc.) chronicles the Russian determination to stem the tide of refugees. From the late 1940s to 1961, “some 2.8 million East Germans fled to the West,” 20 percent of them through Berlin. In response to a spike of 19,000 per month in 1961, the Berlin Wall was constructed and reinforced until its fall in 1989. The central figure of Mitchell’s story is Harry Seidel, an East German cycling champion who might easily have gone to the Olympics. But he had something else on his mind. Within weeks of the building of the wall, he led his wife and son and two dozen others to freedom. The other main player is the Stasi and their thousands of spies and moles. After people died trying to leap from buildings across the wall, crash through it, or swim the River Spree, Seidel began his first tunnel. He wasn’t the only one working in the West. The Girrmann group, making fake passports and hiding refugees in cars, also began a dig, not knowing of the true identity of their East German messenger, the Stasi spy Siegfried Uhse. The author ably captures the dedication of the men and women trying to get family, friends, and complete strangers to freedom. The introduction of newsmen arranging to film the digging and paying for the privilege might have caused friction among the diggers, except that what little money was given went to supplies for the tunnels. The successes were few and failures frustrating, especially in the wake of the unknown mole, but workers were determined and started a new tunnel as quickly as one closed.
A gripping page-turner that thrills like fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90385-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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