A sympathetic, and meticulous account of the life and times of the psychoanalytic giant who mapped a progression of the individual’s lifetime development of identity. Historian Friedman (Indiana Univ.; Menninger: The Family and the Clinic, 1990, etc.) worked with Erikson, his wife, and their family and friends in the years directly preceding Erikson’s death in 1994; he also had access to reams of professional and private records. The goal is not so much theoretical analysis and critique, but rather to place the body of work in the context of Erikson’s own life. As Robert Coles points out in his foreword, Erikson made the connection between psychoanalysis and the social sciences of anthropology, biology, and history; he was a gifted writer whose complex ideas he was able to make clear to a multitude of readers, and his lifetime investigation of how each person constructs an identity is the foundation of our current understanding of the subject. Erikson’s journey would be a compelling enough tale on its own—moving between languages, religions, countries—even had it not generated such a body of work. Erikson never knew who his father was but supposed him to be a Danish gentile; his mother was Jewish. Part of Freud’s inner circle—Erikson was an analysand of Anna Freud—he and his wife left Europe as fascism was on the rise. They lived the rest of their lives moving about the US, where friends and correspondents as varied as Margaret Mead, Benjamin Spock, and Huey Newton helped shape Erikson’s views. Friedman early on puts his finger on a cardinal Erikson quality: in an age of enormous human tragedies, when —contemporaries often described a human condition of gloom, despair, and degradation. . . . Erikson was different. His words and presence signaled hope and possibility despite the enormity of modern human tragedies.— High points (professional acclaim and satisfaction in helping others) and low (professional snarls, family tragedies), Friedman chronicles it all in careful detail. A complicated life, respectfully examined. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: May 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-19525-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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