The book, while missing features useful to general readers, remains a clear and sometimes eloquent introduction to the life...
A generally sympathetic treatment, though also attentive to those many occasions when Emperor Freud wore no clothes.
Kramer (Psychiatry and Human Behavior/Brown Univ.; Against Depression, 2005, etc.) takes on the Godfather of psychoanalysis in this entry in the Eminent Lives series. The author’s prose—clear, precise, jargon-free—is well-suited to the task, but the volume, principally an intellectual biography, offers little scholarly apparatus (no endnotes, bibliography or index) and is missing a chronology of Freud’s life and a list of his important publications. Kramer spends much of the text discussing—very amiably—Freud’s failures as a scientist and a therapist. He properly praises Freud for his ferocious determination to illuminate the structure and workings of the human mind, but he also notes that Freud manufactured evidence, ignored conflicting data, misrepresented cases repeatedly and was frequently wrong. Kramer examines some of Freud’s most famous cases (e.g., the “Rat Man,” the “Wolf Man”) and discusses Freud’s procrustean determination to make his data fit his theory. He credits Freud for some useful vocabulary (transference, displacement) and for his narrative skills, but Freud comes across as ambitious, intolerant, petty, vindictive. And astonishingly hardworking: he wrote his books between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. after a full day of consultation and study. Kramer is not much interested in the quotidian detail of Freud’s life. We do learn a little about his marriage, his children (daughter Anna comes off well), his books (Kramer sometimes fails to provide a publication date), his painful (and losing) battle with cancer of the mouth and the rise and fall of his friendship with one-time disciple Carl Jung.
The book, while missing features useful to general readers, remains a clear and sometimes eloquent introduction to the life and thought of the world’s first shrink.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-059895-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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