Meritorious addition to the bulging shelf of apologia by writers on the noncommunist English left, worth reading by anyone...
The accomplished English novelist follows his first memoir (Experience, 2000) with a post-millennial backward glance at the evil 20th century and its “chief lacuna.”
A child of the 1960s, now himself a half-century old, Amis treats several large and related themes. He reviews the basic facts of the terrible Soviet experiment, which he knows chiefly through having read “several yards of books” about it. Then he turns to the early devotion of his father’s generation to that experiment and their subsequent rejection of it; Kingsley Amis wrote an essay called “Why Lucky Jim Turned Right” in 1967, and his friend Robert Conquest published a history of Soviet terror. Martin’s generation embraced all things leftist during the revolutionary years of the Vietnam War and Paris Rouge, a rhetorically excessive time when “policemen and even parking wardens were called fascists.” Some of these themes have, of course, occupied English intellectuals from Orwell’s time on, but Amis brings to them a fresh look helped in its particulars by shocking revelations from now-open Soviet archives. Among the more controversial theses is his well-reasoned suggestion that Soviet Communism was, in the end, worse than Nazism: “Stalin, unlike Hitler, did his worst. . . . Bolshevism was exportable, and produced near-identical results everywhere. Nazism could not be duplicated.” Readers of The Black Book of Communism will find this argument unobjectionable, but it will certainly earn Amis a hiding in the leftist press. Particularly compelling is Martin’s closing letter to Kingsley, now dead, wondering how either father or son could have been taken in by the romantic lie of a worker’s paradise. The author is no David Horowitz, however; he hasn’t gone Tory in middle age, even if he takes well-deserved swipes at Christopher Hitchens and other fellow travelers while confessing his own sins.
Meritorious addition to the bulging shelf of apologia by writers on the noncommunist English left, worth reading by anyone interested in exploring the dark recesses of the recent past.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-6876-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
IN THE NEWS
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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