A work of such nuance, intelligence, and force that it leaps the bounds of genre.
Stunning contemplation of human relationships, power, and the creation of history through the prism of one woman’s Holocaust survival.
In language that is both marvelously blunt and bitingly sharp, former concentration-camp inmate Kluger (German Literature/Univ. of California, Irvine) recalls her experience growing up in Austria at precisely the right age to have her childhood circumscribed and eventually choked by Viennese anti-Semitism and Hitler's war machine. Placed in Theresienstadt at age 12, she escaped the gas chamber through an accident of fate (an offhand act of kindness from a Nazi) and spent the war shuttling from camp to camp with her mother, who also survived. After a strangely simple escape from one of the final death marches of the war, they immigrated to New York City. Kluger dives in an out of her narrative to consider such topics as her imperfect relationship with her family, her creation of herself as a social being, and the encounters and relationships she's had with Germans since the war. She considers the nature of power and who holds it, extending her line of thought to the crushing sexism of the ’40s and ’50s and making an excellent case that “the Nazi evil was male, not female.” Though the work is relatively slim, it is all meat; Kluger's bristly intellect makes every page hit hard. “This is not the story of a Holocaust victim,” she asserts. In the place of easy sentimentality, we are given a complex testament, one that handily encompasses such phrases as “in a way, I loved Theresienstadt.” Kluger is the farthest thing from an apologist; she merely refuses ever to simplify.
A work of such nuance, intelligence, and force that it leaps the bounds of genre.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55861-271-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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
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
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