A refreshing addition to World War II literature.
This biography illuminates for an English-speaking audience the lives of Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, heroes of the French Resistance of World War II.
Many Americans know little of “la Résistance” and its key players, but the Aubracs are revered in France for their daring guerilla warfare against Nazi occupiers. In this enlightening biography, Rees (Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders, 2011, etc.) focuses on Lucie, an intense and driven young woman. “Refusal has been a principle all my life,” Lucie once said, and she more than lives up to this quote. When the Germans invaded France, the Aubracs faced a difficult decision: should they endure fascist rule or simply flee to the United States? Their decision to remain and fight led them to constant danger. Lucie arranged jail breaks, tied herself to the undersides of trains, and oversaw forged documents. She proved to be a tireless fighter, broadcasting for the BBC and organizing a death-defying ambush. In the later chapters, Rees examines a controversial question: were the Aubracs actually informers for the Germans, as one Gestapo officer claimed? While this is a wrenching possibility, the author adds additional layers to her story, showing how the Resistance was rife with division and doubt. The Aubracs were disappointed, in the wake of World War II, to find French colonialism just as abusive as Nazi operations in France. The 1940s were a desperate time for Western Europe, and the Aubracs’ exploits seem less sterling in retrospect. “War records, war secrets, war shames,” writes Rees. “They were all a constant bubbling undercurrent to political life in France…joy was mingled with fear that some very uncomfortable stones were going to be turned over.” Still, the author manages to celebrate Lucie’s extraordinary life, warts and all. Like the novelist André Malraux and adventurer Jacques Cousteau, Lucie was extremely active in the war’s aftermath, but she and Raymond were often disenchanted by the politics of the Fifth Republic.
A refreshing addition to World War II literature.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61373-567-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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