A fitting capstone to a distinguished literary life and an exposition of one of the main flaws of communism—that “the...
From the Nazi concentration camps to the communist show trials, Klíma (No Saints or Angels, 2001, etc.) shines a vibrant light on the machinery of oppression and the struggles of artists and intellectuals to subvert government control.
For decades, the author was one of Czechoslovakia’s most prolific and influential writers of samizdat, but he has never told his own story in such detail. After miraculously surviving Theresienstadt, he enthusiastically joined the Communist Party (“It was as if the walls of the fortress where I had been forced to spend part of my childhood had hindered me from seeing the world in its true colors”) and decided to pursue writing. The travails of his father, an engineer prosecuted for running a factory that failed to meet its production quota, and the growing sense of paranoia in the literary and publishing communities in which he was beginning to establish himself gradually opened his eyes to the futility of communism, “a nefarious confederacy that in the name of grand objectives stole the property of society and destroyed what it had taken generations to create.” More than a memoir, the book is the intellectual history of a city and a memorial to its inhabitants, who, laboring underground, kept the idea of democracy alive after the Prague Spring. Encompassing all the major journals, movements and personalities who shaped Prague’s cultural and artistic life in the latter half of the 20th century, the author also touches on some of the themes—tension with Slovakia, postwar depopulation and stagnation of the countryside, the ongoing struggle to integrate gypsies and other minorities—that continue to shape the Czech Republic’s identity.
A fitting capstone to a distinguished literary life and an exposition of one of the main flaws of communism—that “the betrayal of intelligence leads to the barbarization of everyone.”Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2170-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
IN THE NEWS
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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