A deeply sympathetic psychobiography of Bruno Bettelheim, the much honored yet controversial therapist who for nearly three decades directed the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, a Freudian-based residential treatment center for disturbed children. When Sutton, Paris correspondent for National Public Radio and the London Daily News, began work on this biography in mid- 1990, Bettelheim had, she says, ``all the trappings of a saint.'' However, within weeks of his suicide that year, former patients began accusing him of brutality and sadism, creating a scandal that left even his close associates confused. To understand this complex man, Sutton begins by looking at his family—a syphilitic father, a mother who regarded him as ugly—and finds in his childhood the seeds of lifelong anger, shame, and self-contempt. In 1938 Bettelheim, a prosperous Viennese merchant becoming deeply involved in psychoanalysis, was arrested by the Nazis and spent ten months in concentration camps. At Buchenwald, says Sutton, Bettelheim, a chronic depressive, discovered the strength of his will to survive, a discovery that prompted him to devote his life to working with troubled children. His observations of human behavior at Buchenwald led to writings that established his reputation in the US, where he fled after his release in 1939. By the 1940s Bettelheim had become a new man, with a new profession, a new family, and even a new, self-invented past. Sutton concentrates on his years at the Orthogenic School, where ``his talent as a clinician sprang from his personality, his history, and his wounds.'' According to Sutton, his inner child took over at times, making him ``grandiose, demanding, provocative.'' That he exaggerated his success in treating autism and that he invented his professional background Sutton acknowledges. Whether he ever brutalized children in his care is less clear. A revealing study that nevertheless leaves Bettelheim as controversial as ever.
Pub Date: May 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-00635-3
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
