As a teenager, Nelken, who is Jewish, kept a diary of the permanent destruction of her comfortable life when the Nazis overran her homeland. Unlike Anne Frank, this girl survived the Holocaust to tell the full story. Now an art historian, she was born to a prosperous, assimilated Polish family. And she recalls, with bittersweet verisimilitude, her idyllic early days in Krakow—the people and the pastry, the kitchens and the streets. Moved from home to the ghetto and to ever more confined quarters and constricted living conditions, Nelken goes on to describe the travails of her parents and brother, her friends at gimnazium (when she was allowed to attend school), her work (including enforced street cleaning), and, with special grace, her youthful yearnings and romances. Despite lack of rest and food, she notes the music, poetry, and aspirations she found in the ghetto. “Somehow,” she wrote in her diary, “I hope that something will happen and my life will change for the better.” Then the ghetto was closed, and Nelken, her mother, and sister-in-law were sent to the Plaszow, Auschwitz, and RavensbrÅck concentration camps, where the likes of Amon Gîth, Franz Hoessler, and Dr. Mengele were her keepers. By the closing days of the war, some prisoners were able to escape and, save for her father, the author and her immediate family endured. Her story of purgatory is a lifetime ago and a world away from her present life in academic Cambridge, Mass. But she fulfills a moral obligation to remember the past, while urging us not to heed the “professional Holocaustniks” who weren’t even there. “If only,” she wishes for those who were, “I could protect all of us from forgetfulness, individually, as we were, we living people!” In moving testimony, her legacy is another story snatched from six million. An intelligent and writerly memoir. (16 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55849-156-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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