A gripping real-life tale of extraordinary courage that had an enduring impact.
Kansas teenagers rediscover a forgotten Holocaust heroine in this moving historical drama, based on a true story.
Irena Sendler, a Catholic welfare bureaucrat in German-occupied Poland, saved thousands of Jewish children during World War II by organizing a network that smuggled them out of the Warsaw Ghetto to live in convents, orphanages and private homes. Mayer’s superb novelization of her exploits elevates social work to the intensity of a spy thriller. Posing as a nurse, Sendler carries youngsters out in boxes and bags, hides them under soiled dressings and piles of corpses headed for the cemetery or secrets them away in a truck equipped with a dog trained to bark over their cries. She coolly bribes and bluffs her way past guards, though discovery means execution. In the midst of this deadly caper, Irena registers the horrors of the ghetto—the pitiless struggle for food, the families that quietly die off from starvation and the anguish of parents who realize they can save their children only by giving them up forever. (Sendler buried lists of children’s names and locations in jars, hoping to reunite them with parents, but most of their families perished.) Writing in vivid but restrained prose, Mayer describes this agonizing situation with understated pathos. In one spare, heartbreaking scene, a mother flings her infant blindly over the ghetto wall to the “Aryan” side as the last Jews are rounded up for transit to death camps. The author frames Irena’s saga inside an account of three Kansas high-school girls who wrote the titular playlet about her in 2000 as a class project that became an international sensation. As the teens try to imagine Irena’s unfathomably different circumstances, they find that her life resonates with their experiences of loss and shattered families. Mayer’s narrative eventually loses its way amid the hoopla over the Irena Sendler Project, but his rendition of Irena’s story has an inspirational power of its own.
A gripping real-life tale of extraordinary courage that had an enduring impact.Pub Date: March 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0984111312
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Long Trail
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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