A picaresque memoir that tells much less than all.
Stoessinger (Global Diplomacy/Univ. of San Diego; Crusaders and Pragmatists: Movers of Modern American Foreign Policy, 1979, etc.) outlines his progress from childhood in Vienna on the brink of war to Prague, Shanghai, and finally, America and a taste of fame and fortune.
Though the author lost his grandparents to the gas chambers during the Holocaust, he escaped the worst of it, despite the implications of his book’s title. Stoessinger, his mother and stepfather, whom he despised, left Nazi Europe just in time. The young émigré, with the help of caring strangers, attended Grinnell College. Soon, headed for the academic bright lights and Harvard, he left his wife in Iowa. In Cambridge, he associated with the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger and was eventually noticed as a rising political scientist. Accepting a position at the United Nations, Stoessinger craved further fame and fortune. Despite a distinct fear of marriage, he married again, fathering a daughter. He was also attracted to a fetching world-class swindler. She was his lover for whom, at her instruction, he did many patently stupid favors, which resulted in an indictment as a participant in fraudulent activities. A plea bargain allowed the author to teach prisoners instead of serving time. Released from his marriage’s “banality,” he launched into another passionate liaison, but that didn’t thrive, either. Stoessinger also purports to have been too affected to visit his mother as she endured Alzheimer’s. Though the author offers a few interesting anecdotes, he is often self-congratulatory and engages in excessive name-dropping. The text carries to excess the ration of pride generally granted memoirs, and his egotistical “hope to leave behind a spiritual legacy” to help mankind abandon war rings false.
A picaresque memoir that tells much less than all.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1629146522
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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