A lively, chatty exploration of a life that veered in many intriguing directions.
The biography of a little-known figure who escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager and, after a colorful series of careers, went to work as a cataloger for the Library of Congress for two decades.
The first book by fellow librarian Stewart takes advantage of Ruth Rappaport's (1923-2010) voluminous diaries and letters as well as an oral history recorded a few weeks before her death, all now stored at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1938, then 15-year-old Rappaport, “a diligent, intense, bespectacled bookworm who questioned everyone and everything,” boarded a train for a visit from her home in Leipzig to Zurich and then refused to go back with the mother who, like her father, would later die in a concentration camp. In Zurich, she was taken in by a series of foster families, one of which complained that she was “spoiled and self-important,” while she waited to get a visa to the United States. A year later, she moved in with her wealthy aunt and uncle in Seattle, where she continued a heavy involvement with the Zionist movement that she had begun back in Germany. After years of dropping into and out of college and working for various papers in Israel, Paris, and New York, she settled on librarianship as a career. In Saigon during the Vietnam War, she was responsible for establishing a network of libraries for those in all of the armed forces. Then, from 1971 to 1993, she worked as a cataloger at the Library of Congress, where her first job was to recatalog a collection that included “pornography, erotica, race-track guides and other items confiscated by the FBI.” Stewart is frank about Rappaport's prickly personality, her tendency to carry on with married men, and the idealism that led her to abandon one project or person after another. Those details, coupled with more admirable qualities like curiosity and drive, serve to make her an entertaining presence.
A lively, chatty exploration of a life that veered in many intriguing directions.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0415-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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