Zantovsky brings an intimate perspective to this impressive biography of a man and history of a beleaguered nation.
An insightful biography of the unlikely leader of the Velvet Revolution.
In his first book written in English, diplomat and translator Zantovsky, Czech ambassador to the Court of St. James, chronicles the eventful life of playwright, political activist and Czech president Václav Havel (1936-2011). As Havel’s press secretary and adviser, Zantovsky admits his affection for his friend, but he presents a balanced, candid portrait of his subject’s personality, achievements and inner demons. Born to privilege, Havel came of age in communist Czechoslovakia, witness to oppression and injustice that intensified after the Soviet-led invasion of 1968. His political critiques found their way into his plays, but he struggled with “the question of a passive participation in evil.” His characters were often weak and flawed, reflecting, Zantovsky believes, Havel’s view of himself in the 1960s and ’70s, when he lived the sybaritic life of a celebrity. Although he felt driven “to do extraordinary things,” Havel’s “strong sense of order and harmony” resisted the messy process of revolution, and his excessive courtesy tempered his tolerance for conflict. Nevertheless, in 1989, emerging from an increasingly active resistance movement that resulted in his imprisonment, he led Czechoslovakia’s peaceful transformation from totalitarianism to democracy and served as president for four terms. “Being in power makes me permanently suspicious of myself,” he once remarked, though he reveled in the theatricality of his role. Installed in the dreary, cavernous Palace Castle, he commissioned an Oscar-winning designer to create new uniforms for the Castle Guard. Sky blue with white and red trim, they “looked a little like costumes from a Franz Lehár operetta.” Sustained by alcohol, cigarettes and a cornucopia of uppers and downers, by 1998, Havel’s physical condition weakened, along with his role in the newly formed Czech Republic, after Slovakia became independent. By then, though, he had become a global celebrity, the darling of liberals, reformers and intellectuals.
Zantovsky brings an intimate perspective to this impressive biography of a man and history of a beleaguered nation.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0802123152
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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