An invaluable document of history as well as a riveting literary narrative, spirited out of France by Saint-Exupéry yet...
An extraordinary account of a French couple’s fleeing of Paris just in front of the Germans in June 1940, followed by a despairing stint among some eagerly appeasing villagers.
A kind of magical thinking takes place in the mind of this first-person narrator as he and his wife were mired in a German-occupied village on their way south by car from Paris. A novelist and journalist who experienced the trench warfare in World War I, Werth (1878-1955) addresses this account to his best friend, pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as a way of establishing facts without elaboration. These facts indeed grow increasingly nonsensical. Moving in a daze of denial, the narrator admits that he was “in no hurry to leave” Paris, yet on the advice of “A,” he decided to put “sixty kilometers between the Germans and us.” The road south was clogged, as cars broke down, people drove wagons pulled by horses, and pedestrians were able to walk faster than the caravan—many of the limping, downtrodden pedestrians were the routed French soldiers. News was fluid, but gossip about the Germans’ actual location was rampant, and angry cries of “France is betrayed!” were common—though the narrator wanted to ask: by whom? Hoping to reach and cross the Loire but thwarted by Germans swarming over the countryside, the narrator and his wife (as well as their nanny, who disappears at some point in the narrative) moved from a hospitable farming family in Chapelon to shelter with a horrifying pair of German-speaking farm wives in Les Douciers, where the narrator watched in a “hallucinatory” moment as one offered the invading Germans champagne. Returned to Chapelon, Werth chronicles strange, intimate encounters between the French and Germans in moving, vivid detail.
An invaluable document of history as well as a riveting literary narrative, spirited out of France by Saint-Exupéry yet somehow "lost."Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-425-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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