A surprising look at societies grappling with profound change.
The unsettling transition from socialism to democracy leaves many people longing for the past.
Polish journalist Szablowski (The Assassin from Apricot City, 2013), winner of journalism awards in his native Poland as well as an English PEN award, investigates the effects of newfound freedom on individuals who spent their lives under authoritarian rule. Some of those individuals are bears: captured, tethered, and trained to dance in order to provide a livelihood for their Romani owners. In 2007, when Bulgaria joined the European Union, keeping these bears was outlawed; they were removed from captivity and sent to a wildlife refuge where they could roam free. Freedom, though, proved a challenge: having been plied with alcohol and candy, “they were used to having somebody do the thinking for them,” and they became aimless and depressed. The bears’ difficult adjustment to freedom serves as an analogy for humans in countries that emerged from communism. Like the bears, many individuals found freedom “extremely complicated.” “It turns out,” the author discovered, “that fear of a changing world, and longing for someone who will relieve us of some of the responsibility for our own lives” is widespread, even beyond “Regime-Change Land.” In a brisk narrative, translated by Lloyd-Jones, Szablowski reports from Cuba, where people fear that Castro’s death will change the culture for the worse; and from Albania and Estonia, where people complain about the breakup of the Soviet Union, the infiltration by the European Union and the U.N., and the trials of independence. “What do we need all this capitalism for, all these American cheeses, juices, and chocolate?” one woman complains. When a power station was built in Kosovo, residents opted to buy their own small generators rather than pay electrical bills. At a Stalin museum, docents extol Stalin’s memory, defending him from such events as the famine in Ukraine and the Katyn massacre. Communism provided free health care, education, utilities, and security, the author was repeatedly told; capitalism leaves some feeling unprotected and at sea.
A surprising look at societies grappling with profound change.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-312974-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
