An emotional tale of unspeakable horrors, family devotion, and art as a symbol of hope.
During World War II, the Nazis easily stole valuable artworks, furniture, and silver from Goodman, who has spent two difficult decades trying to recover them.
The author’s German family, who originally spelled the surname “Gutmann,” were wealthy bankers beginning in the 19th century. In his affecting debut, Goodman, whose earlier career was in the music industry, traces their history, recording that his great-great-grandfather lived in a Dresden castle. The author spends several chapters talking about the financial rise of the family, who once employed Joseph Goebbels in a bank branch. Goodman’s immediate family moved to the Netherlands and lived outside Amsterdam in an estate called Bosbeek, a place the author recalls as having “an almost magical quality.” Then came the Nazis. Goodman rehearses much of the social and military history of the time, tells us about the deaths of relatives in the camps, and describes in excruciating detail how his family lost everything. Going through a box of his late father’s belongings, he discovered the story of his father’s generally fruitless attempt to recover his family’s treasures. Soon, the author and his brother embarked on a long, tempestuous voyage of their own, encountering reluctance, disrespect, doubt, denial, and coldhearted crassness along the way. Throughout the book, Sotheby’s does not come off well. Goodman’s story is alternately wrenching and inspiring, though the diction is often clichéd: writing is on the wall, people hope for the best, places are hell on earth. These locutions often drag this extraordinary story down to the ordinary. Readers will see allusions to many familiar persons and events here: Anne Frank, the Monuments Men, and the works of Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, and numerous other artists. We also learn of some internecine Goodman family squabbles.
An emotional tale of unspeakable horrors, family devotion, and art as a symbol of hope.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9763-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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