A disappointing account of the illegitimate child conceived by Albert Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Mari—, a daughter who disappeared from all records until the publication of her parents’ early love letters in 1986. In 1902, Mari—, not yet married to Einstein, gave birth to a daughter behind closed doors at her parents’ home in the Vojvodina (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). By the following year, all traces of the child had disappeared. Zackheim (Violette’s Embrace, 1996) set out to solve the mystery of Einstein’s “lost” daughter. In her view, the child, named Lieserl, was born with severe mental handicaps. For this reason, Mari— decided to leave the child with her parents rather then return with her to Bern. When Lieserl died of scarlet fever less than two years after her birth, the family covered up all traces of her existence and kept secret this painful chapter in their history. Zackheim has clearly poured herself into this project. She has searched archives, read books and articles, interviewed relatives and friends of Einstein and Mari——plus potential surviving Lieserls—and spent several years in Serbia in search of the lost child. The question she leaves unanswered is: Why should anyone share the author’s obvious passion for this mystery? What does it reveal to us that is new or noteworthy about Einstein or Mari—? If Zackheim has not succeeded in persuading her audience of the importance of her topic in the broader scope of Einstein scholarship, it is because her book imprudently tells more about Mileva Mari— than her husband. In addition, Zackheim has delved so deeply into Serbian folklore, customs, and traditions that she foists them on her subject. Readers do not benefit from Serbian sayings and words that repeatedly appear in mid-sentence in both Serbian and English. Nor does Zackheim present convincing evidence that Mari— herself was closely bound to the Serbian customs she so lovingly details. In this misguided account of the child’s story, Zackheim, playing sleuth, dwells on the details but leaves a void at the heart of the drama.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57322-127-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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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