A dark, compelling narrative of secrecy and betrayal.
An American journalist trolls the archives of the Hungarian secret police (AVO) to piece together her parents’ imprisonment in and flight from Hungary in the mid-1950s.
Marton (The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, 2006, etc.), who arrived with her family in America in 1957 and grew up in Maryland, discovered only after her parents had died how little she understood about what they had endured. Cultured, educated Jews who had been persecuted by the pro-Nazi Hungarian fascists during World War II, Endre and Ilona Marton, based in Budapest, worked as stringers for the American newswire services and for ten years after the war befriended Americans and others from all over the world. The Martons had become essentially the Hungarian news contact for the rest of the world, and in his reporting Endre used candor and irony to expose the Hungarian autocracy. In fact, AVO officials were keeping close tabs on the couple, aided by informers close to the family, gathering evidence that the Martons were passing secrets to the Americans. In 1955, Endre was thrown into Fo Utca prison, and his wife followed four months later; they were tried and eventually released. During the year or so of their absence, Marton and her sister, uncomprehending, were housed in a foster home. The author’s probing work effectively renders an enormously unsettled, painful time of shifting allegiances and political treachery. She even learned that her parents were suspected of espionage by the CIA and were dogged by Hungarian “watchers” in America intent on luring them back to aid the Cold War cause in Hungary.
A dark, compelling narrative of secrecy and betrayal.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8612-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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