An often repetitive but powerful biography.
The life of the famed “Nazi hunter.”
Israeli journalist Segev (1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, 2007, etc.) labors mightily to separate the facts from the myths surrounding Simon Wiesenthal (1908–2005). The author examines Wiesenthal’s horrifying accounts of his experiences in Nazi death camps during World War II, and he knocks down accusations spread by Wiesenthal's detractors that the postwar crusader actually had collaborated with Nazis. Wiesenthal's renown during his long life and after his death is tied largely to the stories of how he tracked down Nazi murderers of Jews and other ethnic victims—with Adolf Eichmann's capture and punishment leading the list. The fame derives in large part from Wiesenthal's own books as well as movies about him starring actors Laurence Olivier and Ben Kingsley. Although largely a Wiesenthal admirer, Segev demonstrates his subject's exaggerations, lies and seemingly bottomless vanity. Wiesenthal operated mostly from Vienna, Austria, after World War II, but traveled the globe as an investigator, lobbyist and public speaker. The biography moves beyond detailed—and sometimes tedious—controversies enveloping Wiesenthal's words and actions to consider such vital questions as who should be considered a war criminal, and for what offenses? “The hunt for Nazi war criminals and their prosecution entailed many basic legal and ethical questions,” writes the author, “and demanded new definitions of crime, guilt, responsibility, punishment and justice.” After all, many of the Nazi death-camp commanders claimed they were just following orders, as do soldiers from every nation that wages war. Segev also wisely examines a larger context insisted upon by Wiesenthal—that the Nazis exterminated not just Jews, but other groups such as Gypsies. Many Jewish leaders and Zionists in general found Wiesenthal's thinking offensive, but Segev gives him his proper due.
An often repetitive but powerful biography.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-51946-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
