A particularly valuable tool for understanding Frankl, as Klingberg manages to collar a wealth of defining moments in his...
Vivid and revealing recollections, impressions, and stories of Viktor Frankl’s life, as told to clinical psychologist Klingberg, his friend and former student.
In a project that took eight years to complete, Klingberg (Psychology/North Park Univ., Chicago) recorded hundreds of hours of conversations with Frankl and his wife Elly. In the process, he managed to elicit from Frankl (1905–1997) the influences, decisions, and graces that went into the making of the mind that produced the soul-expanding Man’s Search for Meaning (1959). Frankl speaks plainly about his secure and comforting early youth, how it may well have had as much influence on his future thought as did the remarkable intellectual atmosphere of early-20th-century Vienna. Not an athletic child, he would instead trip off to attend lectures at the university psychiatric clinic, take sprout in the seedbeds of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jaspers, the Nihilists, Freud, and Adler. He explains the moment of his discomfort with an idea, of the psychological theory and reductionism that deflected him from Freud and Adler, their constrictions and lack of rationality. And how, prior to the concentration camps, he was forming his theory of logotherapy and the development of a less deterministic, more optimistic and humanistic psychology, one rooted in the freedom and independence of the human spirit to assume responsibility in all personal matters, to find meaning in existence by living for someone or something other than the self. Klingberg provides a thorough picture of Frankl’s detractors—from those who were angered by his thumbing his nose at collective guilt to others who found fault in his marrying a Christian to those who thought his work came down to simple mental attitude. The author also does an artful job of painting in the background against which Frankl’s story is cast.
A particularly valuable tool for understanding Frankl, as Klingberg manages to collar a wealth of defining moments in his subject’s life and work.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50036-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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