Haunting family stories that serve as a metaphor for human suffering everywhere.
O’Donnell, a former political correspondent at Bloomberg, debuts with a wrenching family story that spreads across much of the landscape of World War II.
The principal figure in the story is Inge, the author’s grandmother, who died in 2017; throughout the author’s youth, Inge was reticent, even secretive, about her experiences during the war. “Silence has always dominated women’s experience of war,” writes the author. Inge’s experiences, she writes, comprise “a story of love and family, of a girl from a vanished land who lived through a time when Europe, and its humanity, collapsed.” Inge and her family lived comfortably in the Prussian town of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) near the Baltic Sea. The author follows the family—and some of their acquaintances and intimates—through the war and after, chronicling the many horrors they experienced, including displacement, poverty, violence, and, finally, their eventual restoration. O’Donnell’s narrative technique is engaging. She intercuts her family’s experiences with her own as she relentlessly pursued their stories. She traveled to all the key sites, interviewed relatives and scholars, and dug through libraries and archives, including her own family’s. “There’s something about physically seeing places that drives home the reality of the past,” she writes. O’Donnell’s many discoveries included letters, photographs (many of which she includes with the text), and records of all sorts. Gradually, Inge opened up about her past, and we learn that it has some dark corners. Her youthful lover impregnated her, but his father would not permit a marriage, so he left her and went off to war. O’Donnell also discovered a number of key elements of Inge’s history after her death. The author, a graceful, eloquent writer, follows a trail that sometimes takes her through deeply troubling terrain, and she amply reveals the cruelty and compassion that characterize times of war.
Haunting family stories that serve as a metaphor for human suffering everywhere.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-8021-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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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