The rather unorthodox biography of Helen Bamber, a British woman who has devoted her life to supporting the welfare of international victims of torture. In his first book, Belton, an editor at Granta Books, begins Bamber’s story by describing the plight of the Northumberland Fusiliers, a machine-gun battalion captured at the fall of Singapore in 1942. The tremendous physical and emotional trauma suffered by the veterans during the war was heightened upon their return by the sense that British society was unable to acknowledge their suffering. Years later, it was Bamber who began the healing process by listening to the men describe their experiences. What makes this biography unique is that Belton himself employs this listening tactic: Throughout much of the book, he fills in the outline of Bamber’s life with accounts by those who have come into contact with her, as well as with historical chronicles of events through which she lived. Bamber’s presence in the work is that of a witness who is able to retain a sense of humanity in the face of absolute human degradation by allowing victims of torture to give voice to whatever has befallen them. Evidently, her entire career was shaped by her experience as a member of the Jewish Relief Unit sent to the concentration camp at Belsen to coordinate aid to emancipated Jews shortly after WWII. There she gained an understanding of the power of testimony to induce healing. After almost 20 years as a leader in Amnesty International, Bamber was appointed director of the Medical Foundation for the Treatment of Victims of Torture, where, now in her 70s, she continues to carry on her work. A complicated tangle of bleak historical moments and traumatic personal narratives, surprisingly converging into the life story of a compassionate and highly moral woman.
Pub Date: April 16, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40100-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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