An autobiography whose portrait of wartime leaves a lasting impression.
In this debut memoir, a little girl in war-torn 1940s Germany grows up to become a successful American businesswoman.
Parrent was too young to remember the bombings that decimated her German city of Essen during World War II, as she was born in 1942. Her three older siblings, however, knew what the warning sound of sirens meant. One of her brothers was forced to join the Hitler Youth, and the family wasn’t told where he was—or if he was alive or dead. Parrent’s father—whose hair had turned white when he was a young soldier in World War I—refused to join the Nazi Party. Because of this, Nazis beat him so badly that he had to have a metal plate implanted in his head. By piecing together her family’s memories, the author paints a portrait of the terror of war that will have readers on the edges of their seats. Her own memories begin with extreme poverty, as her previously middle-class family was forced to scavenge the countryside for scraps of food. These bleak, deeply poignant scenes are the most gripping part of this short account; for example, as a tiny child, she was thrilled by a single pear a lady had given her, because having fruit at all was such a rarity. Parrent’s clear, incisive, and often vivid prose flows quickly: “The destruction of the bombings erased all shrubs and trees, and no flowers lived anywhere.” After her mother’s horrific death, she says that she faced abuse from her father—he once beat her so badly that she lost consciousness, she writes—before she married and moved to America. This strong woman’s subsequent story intertwines sorrow (the death of a son, divorce, and the deaths of two husbands) with joy (the birth of a daughter) as she tells of working to create a successful temp-agency business, which she opened in 1979. The conclusion, however, is disappointingly abrupt, listing her current activities, including community theater and flying lessons.
An autobiography whose portrait of wartime leaves a lasting impression.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0750-7
Page Count: 106
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
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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