greatest horrors of the war. (60 photos)
The Holocaust account of Gustav Mahler's niece, who went from being the musical heiress of Europe to conducting a
women's orchestra at Auschwitz. There was a fictional treatment of Alma Ros‚'s story in the1980 film Playing for Time, but Canadian journalist Newman and Oregon book publisher Kirtley build this impressive book with much documentation. We are shown Ros‚’s SS order of transport and the passenger list, as well as excerpts from correspondence and interviews with relatives, friends, and the camp performers she rescued from the death chambers. The grand opera of Ros‚'s life follows two acts—before and after Austria's Anschluss (union) with Nazi Germany. Ros‚ (n‚e Rosenberg) was born in Vienna to a distinguished musical family honored by Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef. Her relatives and friends formed a veritable Who's Who of Viennese musical society, a Jewish elite that was much resented by the larger Austrian culture as a foreign clan. Writing letters to try to get Ros‚'s father out of the country were such luminaries as Toscanini, Thomas Mann, and Einstein. Her father's legal and medical condition kept Ros‚ close enough to be arrested by the Nazis. The authors vividly portray every step in her riches-to-rags horrors: Ros‚'s group of inmates were at first chosen to become guinea pigs for experiments in mass sterilization by X-ray. “Faced with the unimaginable circumstances of the Experimental Block at Auschwitz, Alma resorted to the two tools at her disposal: her personality and her music.” These powerful tools ordered a piano, organized many performers into a troupe, and saved many lives. When Ros‚ herself sickened and died before liberation, Dr. Mengele actually tried to save her. Valuable materials include chapter notes, interviews, sources, a bibliography, the Mahler-Ros‚ family tree, a detailed list of the women's orchestra of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a glossary of camp terms. This well-researched and highly readable biography provides a moving account of one woman’s confrontation with the
greatest horrors of the war. (60 photos)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57467-051-4
Page Count: 412
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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