A prosaic memoir of public life by the respected former president of the Federal Republic of Germany (1984—94). After six years of combat duty during WWII, WeizsÑcker earned a law degree in war-ravaged Germany and worked for several major corporations during the next two decades. In the 1960s he became active in the ecumenical church movement, holding responsible positions within the German Protestant Conference and on the executive committee of the World Council of Churches. He was elected as a Christian Democrat to the German parliament in the early 1970s and served admirably as the mayor of West Berlin from 1979 to 1981. Throughout his public life, his chief political concerns were world peace and reconciliation with both East Germany and Eastern Europe. His most noteworthy accomplishment was a speech in the Bundestag on May 8, 1985, calling for a truthful recognition of Germany’s Nazi past, reconciliation with former enemies, and restitution to and a plea for forgiveness from victims of Nazi brutality. This speech set the moral tone for the rest of WeizsÑcker’s presidency. He represented his nation abroad with dignity and fostered good relations with neighboring nations, most importantly the Soviet Union, which was instrumental in the achievement of German reunification in 1990. All this he relates with a certain detachment. There are few intimate revelations, and in recounting his life under Nazism, WeizsÑcker provides no details about his wartime experiences on the Eastern front, surely seminal for an understanding of his subsequent career. He defends the honor of the German army and implies that his family was sympathetic to the German Resistance against Hitler. Most disturbingly, he proclaims the innocence of his nationalistic father, Baron Ernst Freiherr von WeizsÑcker, a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. Such a glaring moral blind spot, though personally understandable, renders this memoir hollow, a disappointment to the discerning reader. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-7679-0301-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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