A unique raconteur tells the history of the 20th century through the stories of its protagonists. Toland has lived one of the most unusual of lives. Born two years before the outbreak of WW I, and a few weeks after the sinking of the Titanic, he spent much of the Depression riding the rails as a hobo, often spending a night in jail ``as a price of the ticket.'' A frustrated playwright, he did not publish his first book until age 45, after leaving his wife (and her dance school, where he taught baton twirling) and learning the art of nonfiction writing by doing magazine articles on subjects like suppressed inventions and fortune-hunting. His work on imperial Japan, Rising Sun, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, and his biography of Adolf Hitler was a bestseller. Captured by History is an intimate account of his interviews with thousands of people—from eyewitnesses to history, such as Gîring's butler, to the crucial figures of our century. Although Toland freely admits that he is not an academic historian and was not traditionally trained, he is sensitive to the seductions and lures of oral and contemporary history. Nor has the historian completely overtaken the playwright; contrary to some theoretical approaches to history that are suspicious of all narratives, Toland insists that history is a story, or more tellingly, history is a play, with narrative structure and drama. ``If it is not that, it is not fully human.'' No doubt he will be criticized by professional historians, but he is a popular bard, recounting what is no less than a modern epic. From the American Midwest of the Depression to the abyss of evil that was Nazi Germany to the mysteries of imperial Japan, Toland has painted in all the vivid colors of a truly ``tumultuous century.''
Pub Date: July 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15490-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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