One of the more curious World War II entanglements, deftly fashioned.
An American woman’s marriage to a Baltic German noble in 1928 promised a fairy tale but ended in a nightmare of war.
New York City–based author MacRae (co-author: Alliance of Enemies: The Untold Story of the Secret American and German Collaboration to End World War II, 2006) is the daughter of now-deceased Aimée Ellis of Hartford, Connecticut, a wealthy young orphan swept off her feet by a handsome descendant of the Teutonic knights once closely allied with the Russian czars; his elaborate name was Baron Heinrich Alexis Nikolai von Hoyningen-Huene. A polyglot with impeccable manners and education, Heinrich was ambitious as well as irresistible; he and Aimée met while on holiday in France in 1927, when Heinrich was studying international law and economics. Aimée had studied art in New York rather than attend college, and when the couple married the next year, she was several months pregnant. The couple made a home on a big farm in a town about 100 miles outside Berlin, during the painful period of crisis and unemployment in 1930s Germany. Heinrich had the right stuff for the rising new Nazi regime: military lineage, Aryan pedigree, an attachment to the land, and a large, growing family. Although thwarted in his professional ambitions and attempting to settle down as a gentleman farmer, he joined the Nazi party and was mobilized and eventually sent to participate in Operation Barbarossa, where a sniper killed him at Mogilev on July 23, 1941. Aimée, left pregnant with their sixth child, had to soldier on under terrible conditions, fleeing her town when it fell under the Russian sector; she eventually brought her children back to America in several trips. Using her parents’ letters written during this devastating time, MacRae does a fine job of portraying the fear and uncertainty felt by her mother, living in a strange land and torn by loyalties.
One of the more curious World War II entanglements, deftly fashioned.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01583-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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