Candid, personal, laced with thoroughly haunting imagery.
Memoirs from the Eastern Front by an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier with an extraordinary grasp the horrors of war.
In a cogent introduction, British historian Max Hastings stresses that the enormity and ferocity of the land campaign between Germany and Russia, the true centerpiece of World War II, were, and still are, in good part lost on Americans. The strategy of the U.S.—a small land force with air superiority—was premised on Russia paying the price in blood to defeat Hitler. At war’s end, Allied dead totaled perhaps one million citizens; the Soviets lost 27 million. U.S. and British forces killed a combined 220,000 German troops; the Russians killed three million and also shot 167,000 of their own troops attempting to flee the battlefield. Introspective Private Reese records his disdain for military service as well as his acceptance of its inevitability, and sets down in page after graphic page the absurdity of the war and his amazement at his own ability to sometimes revel in it (often drunk). After looting a captured train of spirits and food, he writes, “we…whooped and skipped over the rails and danced in the cars…made a Russian woman prisoner dance naked for us, greased her tits with boot polish and got her as drunk as we were.” In the aftermath of a night battle, however, he starkly recalls the faces of the dead and contemplates what is gained by fighting: “If I fell tomorrow, life would go on without me…thousands more were ready to work and to bring the task to completion, to quarrel with destiny, and prevail or, like me, fall by the wayside.” After a furlough, Reese returned to the Front and was killed in 1944; his diary was preserved for decades by his mother.
Candid, personal, laced with thoroughly haunting imagery.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-13978-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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