An immersive and well-told account of a father and his legacy.
In this debut book, a writer shares the story of his father, an innovative structural engineer.
Weidlinger remembers his father, the Hungarian-born Paul, as full of amazing tales: of being arrested and sentenced to death at the age of 18; of becoming an apprentice of Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy and pioneering modernist architect Le Corbusier; of striving to “protect the world” from a nuclear war. Even so, there was much mystery surrounding Paul, who spoke seven languages and had worked on three continents. For example, Weidlinger did not discover that his father was Jewish until he was an adult and found Paul’s will (in which, it so happens, the author was not mentioned). It wasn’t until Paul died in 1999 and Weidlinger inherited a box of his papers that he was finally able to dig deeper into the life of the man. “It was clear that it was in those documents,” writes the author in his introduction, “in the languages I could not understand, that I would most likely find the evidence to prove or disprove his fantastic tales.” A portrait emerges of a Holocaust survivor who, through a series of remarkable encounters, was able to collaborate with some of the greatest artists of the 20th century and help change the way that people thought about architectural design. It is also the story of a man surrounded by tragedy, from the deaths of family members in World War II to the institutionalization of his wife for paranoid schizophrenia. Weidlinger writes with energy and compassion, even about topics that are understandably close to him, as here, when he discusses his father’s influence on his mother’s breakdown: “There are too many unknown factors and, if he did drive her mad, he did not do it with intent but rather with his own fear of her despair at seeing the ‘sharpest relations of things,’ things that were too dark for open conversation.” The book, which features family and architectural photographs, relates a captivating tale, with Paul simultaneously an archetypical European genius and a highly idiosyncratic figure. Fans of architecture will be particularly intrigued, but it is more broadly a story of the visionary upheavals of the 20th century.
An immersive and well-told account of a father and his legacy.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943006-96-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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