The wise, heartbreaking, and very human account of a childhood interrupted. Denes (In Necessity and Sorrow, 1976), a professor in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at Adelphi University, was five years old in 1939 when her father, a newspaper editor and publisher, fled Hungary for the safety of New York City. As he did everything, Gyula Denes fled in style: first-class and with an entirely new wardrobe of 12 suits and 45 shirts. That, in order to do so, he was forced to throw his young family, who remained behind, on the mercy of their relations did not seem to bother him overmuch. Nor did he contact them or send them help in the following years. At first the Deneses were merely poor, but as the war progressed they became persecuted and finally hunted, hiding under floorboards, in cellars, and even in the vilest bathrooms (so vile that their enemies did not want to search there) in order to survive. Denes's elder brother and hero, Ivan, was killed in the final days of the war while acting as a courier for the Zionist resistance group Hashomer. The Russian ``saviors'' who liberated the family's town sent her 14-year-old cousin Ervin behind German lines to tell the enemy to surrender; he never returned. Denes survived, along with her mother, aunt, and grandmother, largely because of her resourcefulness and innate intelligence; what died in the war was her innocence. Finally the family obtained visas for Cuba. When their ship stopped briefly in New York City, Denes met her father, who told her she was not a very pleasant child. ``I know,'' she replied. ``Starving for prolonged periods of time while simultaneously being fed on by packs of lice tends to corrode one's pleasanter side.'' Denes was 12 years old. Wry and tragic, her story brings the horrifying realities of wartime to vivid life.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-03966-8
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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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