An honest, bracing memoir from one of the nation’s most distinguished journalists. This is a tale of escape, assimilation, and success. Frankel, retired executive editor of the New York Times, fled as a child with his mother from Germany on one of the last visas issued by the US Embassy in Berlin after the outbreak of war. The visa was obtained because of the efforts of his mother, a kind of human Roadrunner adept at narrow escapes, who faced down the Nazis in feats of courage and wicked wit. His father went east through Siberian camps; surviving, he finally escaped Soviet anti-Semitism and bribed his way to New York. The son, scarcely daunted, took up newspaper work at Columbia University and never looked back. This critical, self-critical, and wise story of Frankel’s life will also be catnip to those who wish to learn more of the internal history of the Times. In sharp portraits of those with whom he worked (James “Scotty” Reston and Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger among them), Frankel reveals much of the newspaper’s role in events at which he had a ringside seat: Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Pentagon Papers and its resulting path-breaking First Amendment defense, and Watergate. While not everyone will sympathize fully with Frankel’s justifications for all the changes that have overtaken newsroom culture, his own paper, or American journalism—changes for which he was in part responsible—few will tire of his stories and reflections about them. And everyone will gain from his clear explanations of journalistic codes of reportage and behavior. While much of his chronicle concerns his professional life, one also gets a clear sense of Frankel the son, husband, and father—and of the principles, intelligence, and personality that eased his way along. Informative, thoughtful, delightful. (32 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44824-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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