A vivid, multilayered tale that focuses on doctors in Auschwitz and their fates after the war.
A debut novel about the Holocaust explores the role of physicians.
The book’s title refers to the Hippocratic oath, which is fitting since this story deals with the Holocaust and its aftermath from the point of view of doctors in Auschwitz and the parts they played. The chief villain (there are plenty) is Dr. Hans Bloch, protégé of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. The conflicted hero is Dr. Michel Katz, a French Jew who is taken to the Nazi death camp. He curries favor with Mengele in a desperate hope to save his family from the lethal gas and the ovens. He winds up performing autopsies for Bloch. Other characters include Martin Brosky, a survivor and avenger, who witnessed the killing of his parents, and Tamara Lissner, a Czech teenager whom Katz hides after she miraculously survives the gas “showers.” Katz, Lissner, and Brosky lose all their loved ones to the Holocaust. The war ends, and the SS brass and others make desperate plans to save themselves. Bloch manages to get to the United States under Operation Paperclip (with Wernher von Braun, et. al), later changing his identity. Katz, a displaced person, arrives in the U.S., too, and resumes practicing medicine but as a haunted, half-broken man. Brosky tracks down the officer who killed his parents. Now he targets Bloch and enlists Katz, who, with Lissner’s help, has become almost morally whole again. The novel is beautifully written with rarely a misstep. At one point, Brosky reflects on identity: “It was inevitable, death. To some, it came when they forcibly removed you from your own home and placed you in the ghetto. For others, demise followed the forced march out of the squalid tenements to the train. Death of your soul commenced once the doors of the cattle car were slammed shut and locked. And if you lasted that long, upon entry to the camp, you became an invisible being—faceless, nameless, and without spirit.” Some of the descriptions (of firestorms, for example) are almost too vivid to bear. Stein, a doctor himself, fearlessly handles the numerous moral questions, with the characters’ responses to those issues subtly nuanced. There is much to think about even 70 years later (the author includes an extensive bibliography). The Holocaust reverberates here, as it should.
A vivid, multilayered tale that focuses on doctors in Auschwitz and their fates after the war.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9909345-0-9
Page Count: 428
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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