A woman of great strength and spirit pens a winning tale of survival.
Moving from WWII Bucharest to 1970s Los Angeles, a Jewish physician’s memoir details a remarkable journey that includes her escape from communist persecution and, later, her efforts to free herself from the bureaucracy of HMOs.
Immigrating to the United States in 1971, Lowe looks back on a difficult life spent on the brink of tragedy. Daughter of a prosperous Romanian doctor, the author endured the 1944 bombing of Bucharest, the threat of Jewish deportation and the rise of communism after the war. Striking details and extraordinary moments help lift the familiar story above standard WWII fare. An air-raid shelter in the basement of the Municipal Theatre–stage backdrops and actors’ costumes surrounding the hidden–offers strange surroundings to a night of bombing. Ice skates are converted to durable shoes when the family believes they will be forced out of the city on foot, the holes where the blades were attached filled with candle wax. The prose sometimes suffers from awkward phrasing and flawed syntax (English is not the author’s first language), but its peculiarities lend the writing personality and poignancy. After the war, Lowe took on the demanding academic route of following her father’s footsteps and becoming a doctor, a difficult feat at the time, especially for a woman and a Jew. The tales of the young doctor’s early years practicing in the countryside offer entertaining medical mysteries, made even more complicated by the limited supplies and compromised technology. A case of fever, sore throat and sudden death confounds authorities until Lowe, subscribing to the belief that the worst should be considered first, diagnoses diphtheria. In America, struggling with a new language, the author puts her all into passing the necessary exams to maintain her certification, setting up a thriving private practice. Although some of the episodes are too rushed and sketchy, failing to generate tension and feeling, the memoir succeeds as a quick, memorable tale of determination overcoming adversity.
A woman of great strength and spirit pens a winning tale of survival.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4134-7465-7
Page Count: 147
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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