A mellifluous portrait of a country slowly and painfully pulling itself into the European world.
Swedish-born philanthropist and Granta publisher Rausing offers an intimate look at the devastations of communism in Estonia.
The author’s academic study about a small community in post-Soviet Estonia followed her fieldwork on the Noarootsi peninsula in 1993-1994 (History, Memory and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm, 2004). Here, she returns to the notebooks of that year and her memory for a more sensuous, character-rich portrait of the denuded landscape, ruined economy, and erratic, alcoholic personalities she encountered as a dreamy, lonely observer and teacher. The peninsula’s population had been half Swedish-speaking until the Nazis deported them, and those few thousand left were corralled behind the Soviet military barrier into villages that became “like villages all over the Soviet Union at that particular time: forgotten places sinking into quiet poverty.” Estonia’s independence followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the country had to grapple with the Russian presence and language, depopulation and stalled economy. The collective farm in Pürksi was taken over by a “transitory privatisation commission,” and there was new hope for Swedish return and involvement. The signs of Swedishness made the author feel nostalgic for her own Swedish childhood, and everywhere, she gleaned the sense that time had stopped in Estonia. She unearths fascinating history of this remote area, annexed and depleted by Russia, then Germany, then the Soviet Union; all the while, she taught ninth grade in the local school, tramped through the Baltic forests and interviewed people on the farms. In a talk she made to a group of diplomats visiting the village, she was rebuked for being too candid about the Soviet era; instead, she was told ironically she should have said that “everything is wonderful.”
A mellifluous portrait of a country slowly and painfully pulling itself into the European world.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2217-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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