Intelligent, reflective and deeply sad portrait of a man tragically cut adrift by history.
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) stands in for Europe’s uprooted intellectuals in this elegiac portrait by Prochnik (In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, 2010, etc.).
Zweig was one of the most famous and successful authors in the world in the 1920s and early ’30s, best known for his novellas and breezy biographies of historical figures like Erasmus and Marie Antoinette. His fellow Viennese intellectuals might have slightly disdained his wild popularity—except that everyone loved this slight, dapper man with his “genius for friendship.” When the Nazis came to power, Zweig was in a much better position that most, with plenty of money to fund his travels as he roamed from Switzerland to southern France to England and the United States in search of a refuge from the fascist madness. His relative comfort, however, could not make up for the trauma of being ejected from the culture that he, like many other German-speaking Jews, had believed belonged to them as well. “The world we loved has gone beyond recall,” he gloomily told a fellow refugee in Manhattan in 1941. “We shall be homeless in all countries. We have no present and no future.” Prochnik, himself a polymath writer with European Jewish roots, was prompted by the story of his own family, which also fled Nazi-occupied Vienna, to investigate Zweig’s experience of exile. Unable to envision himself settled in America despite four stays in New York, Zweig finally moved to a small village in Brazil in 1941, hoping for peace in which to write. Prochnik sensitively considers his final books—the poignant memoir The World of Yesterday (1942) and Brazil: Land of the Future (1941), which determinedly celebrated his adopted country’s embrace of “the humanist values his native Europe had so wretchedly betrayed.” In the end, accumulating losses and dwindling hopes of a better tomorrow drove Zweig to commit suicide not long after his 60th birthday.
Intelligent, reflective and deeply sad portrait of a man tragically cut adrift by history.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59051-612-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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PROFILES
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
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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