In this unflinching account of betrayed ideals, Wettlin, an American who went to Russia in 1932 for one year but fell in love and stayed another 50, gives a stunning and moving portrait of a long-suffering people ``essentially unpragmatic, uncompetitive, and acutely sensitive to the mystery of life.'' A native of Philadelphia, Wettlin went to the Soviet Union eager to contribute her skills as a high-school teacher to this nation that promised so much. She found a job teaching English, but, more significantly, she met and fell in love with Andrei Efremoff, a director and protÇgÇ of Stanislavsky. The two married and went to Mongolia—a place still relatively unchanged by the Communist regime—where Andrei established a regional theater. Back in Moscow, a son and daughter were born; Andrei worked in the theater; and Wettlin taught English—but the times were changing as the great purges began. Though friends and colleagues were arrested, Wettlin, who still believed in the all-knowing benevolent state (and here she makes no excuses for her behavior), began working for the KGB. The Second World War exacted even harsher privations as the author and her husband fled with their children and thousands of other refugees into the Crimea. Her disillusionment began with the lack of change after the war and culminated in a moment of agonized mea culpa. Again working for the KGB, she realized at last ``that between bright moments of seeing the light I had traveled down tunnels of self-deception.'' Wettlin, now widowed, left the Soviet Union in the 1980's, followed a few years later by her family. Indeed a witness to an age, Wettlin has seamlessly interwoven her experiences of seminal events, searing hardships, and remarkable friendships into an eloquent personal record of ``hope abandoned.'' (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 18, 1992
ISBN: 0-88687-654-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
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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