Description:
After three years in four concentration camps during World War II, Jewish neurologist Victor Frankl returned to Vienna to resume his medical practice. When he met an operating room assistant named Elly, it was "love at first eyesight," and over the next five decades, their romance, described in When Life Calls Out to Us, helped inspire the development of Frankl's famous philosophy of logotherapy. For this book, the Frankls cooperated fully with author Haddon Klingberg Jr., a psychologist who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews, extensively researched the Holocaust, and mastered all of Frankl's primary publications (most notably Man's Search for Meaning. Unfortunately, Klingberg is also gaga for his subjects, fetishizing every detail of their lives. (Victor loved Captain Kangaroo and MacDonald's cheeseburgers "minus the mushy bread.") Readers already enamored of the Frankls will likely be entranced by the book; the rest may wish Klingberg had better emulated the linguistic skills of his hero, whose text, he says, were "sophisticated, yet precise and plain. No pointless words. No petty chatter." --Michael Joseph Gross
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