A gripping—if sometimes unpolished—recollection of war and recovery.
A memoir recounts a woman’s search for happiness after a childhood terrorized by war.
When debut author Hershey was a young child, Europe was roiled by World War II, and her native Latvia was squeezed between the twin tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin. Starting at the age of 5, she spent four consecutive summers on her maternal grandmother’s farm in Riga, not far from the Baltic Sea. These were dangerous times, as there were often air raids causing frighteningly close explosions. Sometimes, pilots parachuted right down into fields from their ravaged aircraft and then disappeared into the trees. Soviet and German ground troops, too, came marching through, often hunting for provisions. In 1944, the war took a ferocious turn: the Germans were on the run, the Americans were leaving, and the author and her family were compelled to evade Soviet troops and leave Latvia. They went to Germany via Poland and spent the next six years living in refugee camps. After being turned down by both Australian and Canadian authorities, Hershey’s family made their way to the United States. She attended high school in New York City, studied chemistry at Brooklyn College, and found a job at the Rockefeller Institute, where she met her husband. But she suffered implacable depression, haunted by the trauma of her childhood years. Hershey finally decided she needed to write it all down and embedded herself in the literary community in Sacramento. Throughout this book, Hershey writes achingly about the lingering effects of her beleaguered youth: “I agonized about my major over solitary lunches in a small garden on the campus, where I had a squirrel for company,” she engagingly writes. “I had many interests but no compelling passions.” Also, she chillingly wraps the entire tale in the folds of a family tragedy—her grandfather’s murder in the dead of night, when her mother was just 14 years old. That said, the story meanders toward the end, as her remembrances of later vacations and foreign travel simply don’t stand up to the dramatic accounts that precede them.
A gripping—if sometimes unpolished—recollection of war and recovery.Pub Date: April 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5441-9610-7
Page Count: 180
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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