A searing, astute study of intensive healing and self-acceptance through the absolution of suffering and atrocity.
A mental health professional braids stories of her patients’ epiphanies with her own personal journey through Nazi Germany.
As a Holocaust survivor and clinical psychologist, 89-year-old Eger is often introduced to her audiences at speaking engagements as “the Anne Frank who didn’t die.” Her poignantly crafted memoir is a meditation on two motifs: the internal struggle of psychologically troubled individuals and the deep shadows cast upon the future of a concentration camp survivor. As a teenager living as the “silent sister” in a dynamic Jewish-Hungarian family in Czechoslovakia, the author recalls being forcibly “resettled” to a labor camp and then transported by train as “human cargo” to Auschwitz, where her parents were promptly executed. Eger was somehow spared, and notoriously sadistic executioner Josef Mengele commanded her to dance in exchange for rare bread rations. Sent to other concentration camps, she was plucked, nearly lifeless, from a carcass heap as the war ended. She married, bore children, befriended fellow survivor Viktor Frankl, and began the “cautious joy” of a new life and career in America. Yet she grew desperate to redress a history scarred by evil: “I began to formulate a new relationship with my own trauma.” Crosscutting this intensely bittersweet narrative are portraitures of the author’s clinical patients, many of whose experiences mirrored much of what Eger had to overcome in order to thrive in society. She intriguingly compares her office sessions, and in mining the roots of pain and victimization, she declares that “suffering is universal…but victimhood is optional.” The distressed fabric of the author’s traumatic past becomes a beautiful backdrop for a memoir written with integrity and conviction. Throughout, Eger is strong in her knowledge of what makes life better for those of us willing to relinquish past “regret and unresolved grief” and “enjoy the full, rich feast of life.”
A searing, astute study of intensive healing and self-acceptance through the absolution of suffering and atrocity.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3078-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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