Bleak, blistering, beautiful.
An Israeli journalist explores the interweaving of history and relationships in essays (originally published in Hebrew in 1999) about Israelis who have experienced the odd and extraordinary.
Having spent years writing about Israeli trauma and “how new lives are built on the ruins,” Sarna, founder of the Peace Now movement, here focuses on the inhabitants of a world where history digs its claws deep into the present, and twists. An abandoned Israeli orphan who rose through the ranks of the army to become a decorated commander, worked for the Shin Bet (Israel's secret security agency), and led raids against Palestinian terrorist bases, finally finds that his mother is still alive—having fled Israel decades ago to live as an Arab in Jordan. Two children of emotionally destroyed Holocaust survivors grow safely to middle age, and then, separated by an ocean, kill themselves within two months of each other. A Russian immigrant who may be haunted by the landscape and culture of his mother country crashes his car in the desert and runs away from his companions to disappear for good without a trace. In a parched wilderness near Beersheva, a place “poor as a curse,” a Bedouin boy kills his father—and Sarna argues eloquently for pardoning the parricide. The author has an uncanny gift for rooting out ineffable misery and rendering it visible to the reader, who can become acquainted with what it might have been like to be a seven-year-old Polish Jewish boy when the Germans rolled into the country; or how it might feel to be a Jew in Kurdistan living through first the Turkish, then the British, and then the Iraqi regimes; or what one might think under enemy fire in the middle of a minefield, surrounded by ripped and bleeding comrades, you the only hope of anyone’s survival.
Bleak, blistering, beautiful.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42062-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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