Nonetheless, the author offers evidence for Remarque’s basic decency—and for why All Quiet on the Western Front should be...
A welcome life of the German writer, the first in English, best known in his time and now for the classic novel All Quiet on the Western Front.
English biographer and novelist Tims never quite explains why Remarque (1898–1970) should merit renewed interest today, when almost all of his books have long since gone out of print in English translation. Still, he observes, German readers are rediscovering Remarque, who wrote plenty of frothy romances alongside his classic cri de antiguerre. “It would have given him a rueful satisfaction to know that it is in Germany that his work and reputation are nowadays held in the highest reputation,” Tims rightly observes, for Remarque was one of the first non-Jewish writers to attract the wrath of the Nazi regime; his books were banned and burned for their supposed defeatism, while Hitler’s propagandists chortled that Remarque (or “Remark,” as the writer rendered his name well into adulthood) was an anagram for Kramer. (It was not.) Driven into exile—though a luxurious one—in neighboring Switzerland, Remarque, who had bought himself a nobleman’s rank and had aristocratic leanings, did not vigorously or vocally oppose the Nazis; even so, his Aryan status having been proven to the satisfaction of the authorities, he wisely refused entreaties on the part of Hermann Goering to return to Germany and take on a job as Minister of Culture for Prussia. Instead, Remarque relocated to Hollywood, where he wrote a few scripts and earned local renown for conducting a series of affairs with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Paulette Goddard (whom he later married). That Remarque was never a great writer is a point that Tims successfully evades, and he unwisely attributes negative reviews in the postwar German press not to the possibility that the books in question weren’t good, but to “habitual German hostility towards the world-famous author.”
Nonetheless, the author offers evidence for Remarque’s basic decency—and for why All Quiet on the Western Front should be remembered today, even if its author is not.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1155-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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