A beautifully wrought wartime account; highly recommended for its portrait of the human side of a horrifying period of...
A writer brings her perspective as a therapist with a love of mythology to her debut memoir of growing up in Amsterdam during World War II.
Before the Nazis arrived, de Vries and her parents lived a vibrant life with colorful neighbors in a charming city full of promise. That changed when the author witnessed a little girl in a crowd being taken away by Nazis. Soon after, her father was sent to a camp as a prisoner of war. De Vries was only able to offer her father her toy dog, which she secretly believed was a wolf, to protect him. For the following two years, the author and her mother survived as Amsterdam’s inhabitants starved or were shot in the street, witnessed neighbors betray neighbors, scavenged for food, and burned anything they could find to stay warm. Her mother stayed hopeful and joined the resistance, at one point hiding a young Jewish woman. In one of the book’s most harrowing scenes, de Vries watched as Dutch traitors dragged the woman out of hiding and held her mother at gunpoint. As a child who had been taught to love stories, the author tried to think of a happy ending even as she and her mother ate their meager rations and battled malnutrition. One of the more intriguing aspects of this engrossing account is what happened when the family was reunited after the conflict. De Vries clearly and empathetically portrays how a broken-down family and a devastated city attempted to rebuild after the trauma of war. There are many lovely moments and vivid, heart-rending details that bring the author’s narrative to life, including her stark description of the inexplicable coldness she felt toward her father when he first returned. “I had no feelings for this man hugging my mother,” she recounts. “He had no place in the story of my mother’s and my traumatized life.”
A beautifully wrought wartime account; highly recommended for its portrait of the human side of a horrifying period of history.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-658-9
Page Count: 234
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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