Intellectual history as biography; and biography as the reconstruction from letters and diaries of the inner life and passions of a Jew disenfranchised on account of "infamous birth." As the center of a salon of Jewish intellectuals in Berlin, Rahel nee Levin was an arch-Romantic who championed Goethe, advising a friend to read him "as one read the Bible in distress." At a time when the fact that someone could be melancholy accredited him as a decent human being, Rahel wrote that "my assigned task was life" and threw herself into a series of improbable relationships with men that yielded misery, "higher suffering," and disgrace — that burden of disgrace that in the symbolism of her dream world was equivalent to Jewishness. Her fate was to unconsciously transmute (writes Arendt) "the attempt to assimilate, the effort to climb and to set one's house in order, into a love-affair." After her last-chance marriage in middle-age to a much younger, slightly boorish man of "priestly fidelity," she arrived: from Rahel Levin she converted to Friedrike Varnhagen von Ense — Christian, citizen, noblewoman, wife of a government official — only to discover that it had been just her exile and her unhappiness that made her what she was and gave her, in Arendt's words, "a place in the history of European humanity." An argument, then, against assimilation, completed, according to the author's preface, "when I left Germany in 1933." Arendt's insight into the psychology and the situation of pariah and parvenu is essential.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1974
ISBN: 0156761009
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1974
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
