A vivid, multilayered tale that focuses on doctors in Auschwitz and their fates after the war.
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A debut novel about the Holocaust explores the role of physicians.
The book’s title refers to the Hippocratic oath, which is fitting since this story deals with the Holocaust and its aftermath from the point of view of doctors in Auschwitz and the parts they played. The chief villain (there are plenty) is Dr. Hans Bloch, protégé of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. The conflicted hero is Dr. Michel Katz, a French Jew who is taken to the Nazi death camp. He curries favor with Mengele in a desperate hope to save his family from the lethal gas and the ovens. He winds up performing autopsies for Bloch. Other characters include Martin Brosky, a survivor and avenger, who witnessed the killing of his parents, and Tamara Lissner, a Czech teenager whom Katz hides after she miraculously survives the gas “showers.” Katz, Lissner, and Brosky lose all their loved ones to the Holocaust. The war ends, and the SS brass and others make desperate plans to save themselves. Bloch manages to get to the United States under Operation Paperclip (with Wernher von Braun, et. al), later changing his identity. Katz, a displaced person, arrives in the U.S., too, and resumes practicing medicine but as a haunted, half-broken man. Brosky tracks down the officer who killed his parents. Now he targets Bloch and enlists Katz, who, with Lissner’s help, has become almost morally whole again. The novel is beautifully written with rarely a misstep. At one point, Brosky reflects on identity: “It was inevitable, death. To some, it came when they forcibly removed you from your own home and placed you in the ghetto. For others, demise followed the forced march out of the squalid tenements to the train. Death of your soul commenced once the doors of the cattle car were slammed shut and locked. And if you lasted that long, upon entry to the camp, you became an invisible being—faceless, nameless, and without spirit.” Some of the descriptions (of firestorms, for example) are almost too vivid to bear. Stein, a doctor himself, fearlessly handles the numerous moral questions, with the characters’ responses to those issues subtly nuanced. There is much to think about even 70 years later (the author includes an extensive bibliography). The Holocaust reverberates here, as it should.
A vivid, multilayered tale that focuses on doctors in Auschwitz and their fates after the war.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9909345-0-9
Page Count: 428
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
12
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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