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SIBERIAN EDUCATION

GROWING UP IN A CRIMINAL UNDERWORLD

Visceral memoir of a rough, criminal upbringing in a curious outpost of exiled Siberians near the Moldovan border.

Transnistria was inhabited by a group of transplanted Siberian Urkas, deported during the Stalinist era of Communist collectivization and now deeply entrenched in a nether region. “The people of our villainous district were like one big family,” writes Lilin, who grew up in a house full of wondrous weapons, icons and crucifixes. His father and other males of the family were professional criminals who made good livings as robbers and thugs and boasted a string of prison sentences and violent run-ins with the police. From an early age, the author had to learn the criminal code of conduct, involving elaborate gun-handling rules, resistance to government at all costs, prison stories and the forming of special relationships with older community members, who taught him the old ways. By reciting a Pushkin poem, the author earned a cherished pike, or flick knife, the traditional weapon of the Siberian criminal, and became a hero among his friends. Lilin was also a talented artist and apprenticed at age 12 to learn the trade of the kolshik, or tattoo artist. He and his band of boys were dubbed “Siberian Education,” and were soon embroiled in gang fights, running messages for their fathers and skirmishes with police. In between stints in juvenile prison, the author relates touching moments, such as the prison etiquette still observed when the old criminals dined at Aunt Katya’s restaurant. Lilin’s youthful scrapes and wild yarns eventually ran up against Russian military service at age 18, and the hothead was shipped out to fight saboteurs in Chechnya. A stark account that projects raw energy and youthful swagger.

 

Pub Date: April 11, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-393-08085-8

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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