A raw, troubling inquiry into the deep roots of hatred and the physical and moral starvation that made war inevitable.
An Austrian-born woman confronts her family’s past.
Growing up in Austria in the 1950s, Day (writing as Elizabeth O’Neill: Nine and a Half Weeks, 1978) was given textbooks with blank labels glued on the cover, hiding swastikas. No one talked about the war. As a high school exchange student in America, though, Day began to watch—and binge on—war movies, learning for the first time what the world thought about her countrymen. Her parents refused to answer her questions; she learned only that both had been members of the Nazi Party but not why they joined or what role her father, a policeman, played. Right after high school, Day married and moved to America, where she became obsessed with history. After World War I, Austria, she learned, was destitute: “The near-starvation of the last war years and the years after the collapse, the continuing scarcity of food, of coal, of living accommodations, of jobs, life savings melting in the inflation and no improvement in sight. One’s helplessness in the face of it all.” Germany recovered more quickly, to the envy of Austrians, and in both nations, vindictiveness grew. In addition, anti-Semitism was endemic. Day recognized it in herself, a feeling so indelible that she could not imagine how it began. “The legacy of the Holocaust has tarnished me beyond all methods of cleansing,” she writes. “I felt: I hate the guts of every Jew alive.” With a job in publishing, Day knew and befriended many Jews, but she could not deny her revulsion at the German word Jude that, to her, meant “contemptible.” Day died in 2011; this memoir, here reissued in paperback, first appeared in 1980.
A raw, troubling inquiry into the deep roots of hatred and the physical and moral starvation that made war inevitable.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-231000-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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