First published in Poland in 2008, this matter-of-fact account is chilling, sobering and memorable.
When a prisoner uprising freed hundreds of Jews from the Nazi death camp at Sobibór, Poland, in 1943, Bialowitz heard the leader call out, “If you survive, bear witness to what happened here! Tell the world about this place!” In this harrowing first-person account, the author fulfills the promise he made then.
Bialowitz, now one of only a few dozen survivors of Sobibór, where some 250,000 Jews were exterminated in 1942 and 1943, begins his story in Izbica, a small Polish village where Catholic schoolboys taunted him and the other Jewish boys as Christ killers. When the Nazis arrived, Jews were hunted down and killed, sometimes randomly, sometimes methodically. Quick-witted and determined to live, the teenaged Bialowitz had numerous narrow escapes from death—once he survived a mass graveside shooting by jumping into the pit as the shots were fired and hiding under the dead bodies for hours. In April 1943, however, he was loaded onto a truck by the SS and sent to Sobibór. At the camp, the strong and healthy Bialowitz was selected as a slave laborer, made to unload cattle cars of arriving victims, cut off women’s hair before their gassing and search though piles of clothing for valuables. Escape seemed impossible, for the camp was surrounded by heavily armed guards, barbed wire and a mine field. Nevertheless, in October 1943, in the largest and most successful prisoner uprising of the war, some 600 slave laborers revolted. About half managed to break out, the author among them. He hid in the forest, had perilous encounters with armed partisans, was hidden by farmers out of good will or in exchange for money, and eventually found his way home, only to discover that anti-Semitism had not ended with the war. Bialowitz left Poland and spent years in European displaced-persons camps before moving to the United States in 1950. He has made it his mission to keep the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust alive through lectures, testifying at the trials of war criminals and writing.
First published in Poland in 2008, this matter-of-fact account is chilling, sobering and memorable.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-299-24800-0
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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
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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