No charming folk customs here, just the hard facts of life in the frozen Russian north.
A writer for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza reports on life at the harrowing margins of contemporary Russian society.
The goal—driving solo 13,000 kilometers from Moscow to Vladivostok in a Russian Jeep—sounds like a travel stunt, complete with bandits, militia men, frigid overnights in the cab with the engine running for heat. But Hugo-Bader is a journalist by trade and travelogue is only the pretext for this book, which takes a stark, shocking look at Russia’s lower depths, its homeless people, alcoholics, drug addicts, sex workers and HIV sufferers, among others. Hugo-Bader’s best writing occurs after he finally leaves Moscow and hits the road, passing through off-the-charts places in eastern Russia and especially Siberia. Along the way, he visited with the inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle in Izhevsk, capital of the Russian arms industry; explored a still-lethal nuclear weapons test site near the Kazakhstan border; and interviewed shamans and a self-styled reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Most striking is the tale of the Siberian taiga reindeer herders, members of nearly extinct aboriginal tribes who have been embarking on self-decimation by alcohol and suicide. Amid the brutality, the author found moments of joy and genuine humanity. “Time and again,” he writes, “after ten or more hours of lonely driving across wild wastelands I felt as if I were part of this machine…it was an uncanny feeling, so in my thoughts I had started to humanize it, talk to it, call it names, pay it compliments, saying it had a lovely voice, for example. Because it did.”
No charming folk customs here, just the hard facts of life in the frozen Russian north.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61902-011-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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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