A view of the ocean
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| Format: | UnknownFormat |
| Sprache: | eng |
| Veröffentlicht: |
New York
Pantheon Books
c2007
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| Ausgabe: | 1st ed. |
| Schlagworte: | |
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Tag hinzufügen | Beschreibung: | Summary "The legacy of Dutch novelist and playwright de Hartog (1914-2002) is fittingly capped with this remarkable account of his mother's life and death. His mother was devoted to his clergyman father until he died in 1938, when she came into her own. Although war threatened, she booked passage to the Dutch East Indies to spend time with her oldest son. De Hartog himself only barely survived the war; any faith he'd had was shattered by the senselessness of the deaths he'd seen. Yet his mother returned from a Japanese prisoner of war camp with her spirit and love for her family intact. She lived a quietly religious life in postwar Amsterdam until cancer brought her to the hospital, where her sons attempted to comfort her through the agonies of dying. After her death, de Hartog heard a quotation from Quaker movement founder George Fox, about an infinite ocean of light and love flowing over the ocean of darkness. This vision, he realized, was his parents' legacy to him, just as this powerful, luminous elegy is de Hartog's last gift to his many readers worldwide. (Nov.) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. "I read this memoir in one sitting. I'm at a loss to convey the scope of its beauty and its power. It's the story of a famous author's love for his parents, and particularly for his mother. Both the author and the mother lived through the horrors of World War II, and genocidal nightmares that will haunt us forever. But the book is not about that. It is about the mother's death from cancer and her son's desperate efforts to care for her, to protect her, to somehow survive her loss and find meaning in it. And meaning there is in every page of this story. At times it is excruciating to read, but it never stops being beautiful. And at the end we experience the resolution and the insight that make the book a triumph The author, in focusing on his mother's illness, has perhaps made us all the more aware of the horrors of the War in that he has shown us that every single death is a tragedy from which the survivors must learn in order to go on living. This is a book to give to those who have suffered a personal loss. It's a book to give to those who will inevitably face the illness of a loved one ..."--Amazon.com Guest Review: Anne Rice |
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| Beschreibung: | 102 Seiten 21 cm |
| ISBN: | 9780375424700 978-0-375-42470-0 |