A dialogue between two friends who have been prominent 20th- century figures on such topics as wide-ranging as childhood, faith, war, and literature. The contrasts between the late French president Franáois Mitterrand (The Wheat and the Chaff, 1982), who died in January of this year, and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel (All Rivers Run To the Sea, 1995, etc.) resound more emphatically than any similarities. While Mitterrand's childhood was almost idyllic, Wiesel's was haunted by fear: "Fear of anti-semitic thugs, fear of demons, fear of God." Yet it was Mitterrand—raised as a practicing Catholic- -who came to doubt the existence of a supreme being after experiencing the cruelties and injustices of WW II. Wiesel, on the other hand, accepts that certain things may be beyond human understanding. And although it is Wiesel who went through the horrors of the Holocaust, it is Mitterrand who holds the more pessimistic view of mankind ("We have still not evolved beyond the barbaric stage of evolution"). Both express horror at the recent resurgence of dangerous religious fanaticism. The fundamentalist, insists Wiesel, "denies the right of inquiry and therefore negates culture." While Mitterrand has been sympathetic to Jews and the Jewish state, he expresses considerable empathy with the Palestinian cause. A two-state solution, he insists, is the only just one. Wiesel is less than optimistic and more wary of the Palestinians. The book's last two sections involve discussions on literature and power. Wiesel leans to Kafka, where Mitterrand prefers Tolstoy. The writer generously draws from the politician his ideas about creativity and does not offer his own theories on the dynamics of leadership. Indeed, Wiesel is often playing the role of the admiring interviewer here, but the more profound and readable comments are his. Not the intimate memoir of its title, nor a place to glean insights into the personal lives of these two public figures. But private thoughts on significant public issues abound.
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 1559703792
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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