by Mieke Eerkens ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
The sins of the fathers are visited on their children, indeed. Eerkens’ poignant book sheds new light on the history of...
A generational memoir of war and its long-lasting effects on descendants.
History, the old saying goes, is written by the victors. The fortunes of the losers often go unnoticed, particularly if the losers are associated with a bad cause. So it was in the case of one side of Eerkens’ family, her grandfather a member of a Dutch nationalist party with ties to the Nazi occupiers. She writes dolefully of discovering an article of his that she turned up in the National Library, “someone who supposedly had Jewish colleagues and friends whom he spoke highly of, writing clearly anti-Semitic, racist nonsense for a racist NSB publication.” Understandably, that grandfather did not wish to discuss his past, and the author’s mother was too young to comprehend events, though her older siblings recalled being shunned and cursed by their neighbors. On the other side of the family and politics was her father, imprisoned with his family in the Dutch East Indies; Eerkens focuses closely on the fact that the Japanese military ran “brutal labor camps for civilian prisoners including women and children,” to terrible effect. The author examines the psychology of loss on the part of children caught helplessly in tumultuous events. In the case of her parents, who met as adults after the war and raised their family in California, their experiences lingered in large and small things—e.g., her mother’s frugality, explained by her aunt with the meaningful phrase, “we aren’t just automatically entitled to nice things.” Privations and fears became ancestral memories “imprinted on my genes.” Eerkens’ work takes on a particularly timely note when, in closing, she notes the rise of a new wave of nationalism, a time when “people I know and care about have endorsed candidates and political positions that I find unconscionable,” reverberating again through the generations.
The sins of the fathers are visited on their children, indeed. Eerkens’ poignant book sheds new light on the history of World War II.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-11779-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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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