An undistinguished biography of a problematic hero.
The life of a little-known American WWII hero.
Varian Fry is the only American honored at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial. And he’s there with good cause—in the year and a half after the fall of France and before the implementation of the Final Solution, Fry smuggled hundreds of thinkers, artists, and other at-risk Jews out of France and into America. Outwardly, Fry was an American Schindler, and this is certainly how Isenberg would like the reader to view her hero. However, there is something incongruous in the author’s praise for Fry, and the character that emerges from her own text. Fry went to France to save writers, artists, and intellectuals. He selected whom to help, and those he decided society would not miss were left behind. Selection involved an ugly calculus that Fry ultimately regretted, but accepted. This problem is compounded by Fry’s own noblesse oblige attitude towards his task. He rarely spared himself any comfort, took a little too much pleasure from hanging out with the famous among the exiled, and complained of being overworked. On one particularly trying day, he confessed, “I was actually glad to have a few of the most insistent and pestiferous ‘clients’ carried shrieking off.” Fry’s life was also marked by a reflexive contempt for authority, which consistently undermined his “brilliance.” It was in France that Fry fulfilled his potential. His job required working around the authorities, and he excelled. His employers, however, were never comfortable with his work. Although Isenberg faults their failure to understand occupied France, one cannot help but wonder if their primary complaint—that his staff of 21 was too large—was not correct. Fry returned to the US expecting a hero’s welcome, which he never received. Now, at a time when Americans are determined to leave no corner of WWII bravery un-praised, Fry has found his trumpeter. But despite both Isenberg’s and his wishes, heroism, even when great, can be ugly.
An undistinguished biography of a problematic hero.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50221-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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