A classic (of two genres) finally translated into English. As an example both of Holocaust literature and the memoir, the diaries of Klemperer are superior. First published in 1995 in Germany, the diaries there caused a minor sensation: Nearly 150,000 copies of the 1,500-page hardcover edition were sold (the present volume contains the first half of the diaries, in a slightly abridged form); a television serial is in production. Although less well known than his famous conductor-cousin, Otto Klemperer, Victor began his career as a literary journalist and became a highly regarded historian and scholar of the Enlightenment—a courageous choice in a Germany where the “superficial” French Enlightenment was spuriously contrasted with the “profundity” of German philosophy. Klemperer, a German Jew, served in WWI and married a Protestant woman; both experiences would help to insure his survival during the Holocaust. For him, just as for many others in Nazi Europe, the decision to keep a diary was an act of moral rebellion and resistance against a totalitarian state. The diaries are unique, written with a marvelous urgency. As a linguist, Klemperer has always been sensitive to the nuances of words; his study of the Nazi lexicon, published after the war, is a classic in the field. In the diaries, he didn—t wish to paint a large picture, preferring instead to record life’s daily small details. Six weeks after Hitler’s appointment, Klemperer confided, “I can no longer get rid of the feeling of disgust and shame . . . it’s terribly frivolous to write all this in my diary.” He always insisted that as a German Jew he represented the —real— Germany, while the Nazis were barbaric impostors. Whatever kind of catharsis the diaries may supply to Germans, others will also read them gratefully. (First serial to the New Yorker)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45696-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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