Here, from the dean of Holocaust historians, is that rarity, a contemporary autobiography that is actually too short. Recently retired as a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, Hilberg writes movingly of his youth in Vienna and his experiences as a refugee in Cuba and New York. The heart of his work recounts the 13 lonely years he spent sifting through over 40,000 German documents while researching his pioneering, magisterial work, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), the first study to look at the German bureaucratic machinery of destruction from 1933 on. He notes how difficult it was to find a publisher—several university presses (including Princeton and Columbia) rejected the manuscript. Hilberg also staunchly defends his controversial thesis that during the Holocaust, European Jewish institutions became ``an extension of the German bureaucratic machine.'' Yet his view on this question is severely limited by his lack of access to the Yiddish and Hebrew sources carefully culled by Isaiah Trunk in his book Judenrat. This definitive work on the Jewish councils under Nazi rule paints a much more complex picture of local Jewish leaders' behavior. However, Hilberg is on target in critiquing such historians as Martin Gilbert, who define ``Jewish resistance'' during the Holocaust so broadly as to render the concept almost meaningless. He also settles scores with other scholars and popular historians of the Holocaust, most notably political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Hilberg tellingly notes how extensively Arendt ``borrowed'' from The Destruction for her Eichmann in Jerusalem, while providing only the flimsiest credit. Hilberg's style is crisp and succinct, perhaps to a fault. This is very much the memoir of a scholar; those hoping for extensive insights into Hilberg the man will be disappointed. One is left wanting more, though also filled with admiration for this remarkable historian's single-minded dedication to his craft.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1996
ISBN: 1-56663-116-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
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