The protagonists' individual choices and family backgrounds give this biographical history a unique, intimate quality.
British documentary filmmaker and journalist Harding traces the lives of Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss and Hanns Alexander, a Jewish refugee from Nazism who hunted him down and brought him to justice.
The author only learned about his great-uncle Hanns' wartime record when attending his funeral in 2006. Alexander served with British forces during World War II, refused awards for his wartime service and never told his own story. (He also swore he would never return to Germany, and he didn't.) Harding commemorates his great-uncle's life and the contributions that helped to ensure that crucial evidence was presented at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in what the New York Times described as “the crushing climax to the case.” The author traces the lives of Alexander and Höss in parallel. Alexander's family, along with other Jews, were steadily stripped of the capacity to function following Hitler's assumption of power, yet they were conflicted about leaving their homeland. Höss joined the Nazi Party in 1922 and was later recruited into the administration of the concentration camp system by Heinrich Himmler. Höss organized the Auschwitz camps under Himmler's orders and accepted the part he was personally assigned in the Final Solution. Höss and Alexander crossed paths after the Allies liberated the Bergen-Belsen death camp on April 15, 1945; it was then that Alexander became an avenging stalker of Nazi war criminals and Höss, his prey. Alexander's hunt unravels some of the background to Allied decisions about pursuing war criminals and punishing war crimes. Höss admitted to the murder of millions of Jews in interviews conducted for the war crimes tribunal and was finally executed in Poland. Harding's portrayal of both men's lives before the war sets the scene for the hunt and its aftermath.
The protagonists' individual choices and family backgrounds give this biographical history a unique, intimate quality.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1184-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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