A beautifully written and translated work that creates rare, subtle portraits of Germans.
A stunning portrait of a strenuously anti-Nazi family in Berlin who managed to hang on to their moral convictions during the brutalizing Hitler years.
A conservative historian and journalist who wrote a biography of Hitler, among other works (Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, 2004, etc.), Fest first published this moving memoir of his coming-of-age during the Third Reich to enormous acclaim in Germany in 2006, also the year of his death at age 79. One of five children born to a politically committed teacher, Johannes Fest, who was alarmed by the ascent of the Nazi Party at the expense of the Weimar Republic, the author and his siblings grew up in a middle-class Berlin suburb and were duly inculcated with their father’s staunch prophetic teachings about the perils of surrendering to Nazi lawlessness. Johannes took his children to see the burned-out Reichstag, lost his civil service job in 1933 due to his perceived inability to support the “national state,” and was frequently shunned by neighbors, prompting his fearful wife to plea for compromise with the Nazi state so that their life would be easier. But Johannes maintained his moral convictions, and the author and his older brother were invited to a “second supper” with his parents after the smaller ones had gone to bed in order to discuss the events of the day in secrecy. Fest’s portrait of his father is strikingly sympathetic, especially against the backdrop of an increasingly acquiescent German populace for whom “upholding the law was more important…than justice.” After boarding school and recruitment into the compulsory Hitler Youth, then the Luftwaffe, Fest experienced a horrifying end to the war, yet his memoir focuses more on his literary and musical development.
A beautifully written and translated work that creates rare, subtle portraits of Germans.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59051-610-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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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