A perfectly pitched biography that relies, as it should, as much on perceptive insights as documentation.
A profile of the man who assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of South Africa’s policy of apartheid, that is both a compelling study of a tragically disturbed individual and an affecting metaphor for the apartheid years.
Van Woerden, whose working-class family emigrated from Holland to South Africa in 1956 (when the author was only nine) has a special sympathy for the “coloreds” (South Africans of mixed race) who still live in a kind of racial no-man’s-land, discriminated against by both black and white. They were his family’s neighbors until the early 1960s, when Verwoerd, implementing his policy of racial separation, removed them from the racially mixed Cape Town suburbs and settled them on the bleak Cape Flats. Demitrios Tsafendas, the parliamentary messenger who assassinated Verwoerd in 1966, was also a colored. Born in 1918 in Mozambique, his father was Greek and his mother a half-caste. Using documents assembled by the authorities, as well as interviews with the aging Tsafendas (confined in a psychiatric hospital until his death in 1999), the author creates a perceptive portrait. He sees Tsafendas as a tragic, gifted figure, tormented by racism and mental illness alike, and driven to act by Verwoerd’s treatment of the coloreds and his own experiences (especially those with his family in South Africa, who shunned him). Van Woerden traces the long painful journey that ended with the assassination and began in childhood (when Tsafendas was sent to Egypt to be raised by his paternal grandmother)—and included sojourns in Greece, Turkey, Portugal, and even the US (where his status as an ex-Communist, rather than his racial history, led to his deportation).
A perfectly pitched biography that relies, as it should, as much on perceptive insights as documentation.Pub Date: June 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6631-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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