It is hard to imagine that Samuel, as a boy, struggled to translate “Hast Du genug fur Heute?” (“Do you have enough food for...
First-time memoirist Samuel tells the story of life after WWII.
The author’s father was a Luftwaffe officer during the war. As the Reich begins to collapse in 1945, ten-year-old Samuel, his mother, and his sister flee Germany, making a terrifying and pitiful home for themselves in refugee camps. Eventually the family returns to Strasbourg, where Samuel begins to come to grips with two evils: the Nazi regime that ruled during the war, and the Communist apparat he now has to contend with. Later on his family moves to America, and (as we learn in the epilogue) Samuel goes on to serve in the US Air Force for three decades. The descriptions of the horrors of war and its aftermath are a touch too predictable to hold the reader’s attention, but Samuel’s portrait of life in Germany (especially in the innocent days before the Reich crumbled) are lovely and evocative and manage to humanize German civilians under Hitler. Especially moving are Samuel’s descriptions of his grandparents, Oma and Opa Samuel. They were the one sure source of love in young Samuel’s life—his mother never had a kind word for him, and she often pummeled him with a rug beater or locked him in a broom closet for hours on end. Oma is a font of wise aphorisms, however, and Opa subtly teaches Samuel to resist the Reich (instructing him to greet people with “Guten Morgen” instead of “Heil Hitler”). “My grandparents’ house was full of mysteries,” Samuel writes, as he goes on to describe his exploits in the Green Room (so-called for its thick, verdant velvet) and his first taste of liquor at his Opa’s knee.
It is hard to imagine that Samuel, as a boy, struggled to translate “Hast Du genug fur Heute?” (“Do you have enough food for today?”) into English—for now his prose sings (or, at least, whistles and hums some lovely tunes).Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57806-274-8
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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
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