A movingly illuminating biography.
A prizewinning French writer tells the story of how a Soviet meteorologist lionized by Stalin was wrongfully imprisoned and executed during the Great Purge of the 1930s.
Alexei Feodosievich Wangenheim (1881-1937) was a distinguished weather scientist. Appointed the first director of the Soviet Union’s Hydrometeorological Centre in 1929, he worked tirelessly to promote the interests of the Communist Party. He believed that the Soviet Union’s ascendancy as a world power lay in its ability to convert wind into electricity that would heat and light its vast terrain. As Rolin (Hotel Crystal, 2008, etc.) writes, “[Wagenheim’s] role in the construction of socialism was to help the revolutionary proletariat control the forces of Nature.” His work was recognized by Stalin, who praised the scientist as a national hero for his help in ensuring the success of one of the Soviets’ high altitude balloon experiments in 1933. Then a colleague implicated him in the activities of what he claimed was a counterrevolutionary organization within the Hydrometeorological Centre. In January 1934, authorities imprisoned an innocent and utterly dumbfounded Wangenheim—who was also a descendant of the hated Russian aristocracy—without ever telling him the exact nature of his crimes. The meteorologist was eventually sent to northwestern Russia, where he spent the last three years of his life doing forced labor in Stalin’s gulag system while stubbornly clinging to his socialist beliefs. Part of what makes this book so fascinating is the way Rolin, using letters and other historical documents, depicts the unswerving nature of Wangenheim’s faith in the Communist Party despite his mistreatment. The real horror is not so much the fate he and his gulag comrades suffered, but the extremes to which they were subjected before they even began to question the political system they held so dear. Timely and well-researched, the book is a reminder of the real, human cost of blind loyalty to totalitarian political ideologies.
A movingly illuminating biography.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-781-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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