Anna Redsand
WorksViktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living
This Young Adult biography is the compelling account of how one man forged a life of triumph in the crucible of the Holocaust. In 1942 Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy and later the author of Man's Search for Meaning, had just begun his career as a psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna when he was deported to the first of 4 concentration camps. The story begins with Frankl's childhood and teen years and goes on to tell how Frankl lived his belief that a person can survive the most horrific conditions by finding meaning in them. Illustrated with Holocaust images and family photographs. Also available in Korean. REVIEWS "...a good Holocaust book forces readers to think about their own lives in two ways: What would I have done then? What connection and moral choices must I make now?...[This] is exactly the power and glory of [this] biography of Viktor Frankl." ~Ottawa Jewish Bulletin "The author successfully illuminates how the Holocaust deeply affected Frankl's life and career, as he continued to find meaning through his writing, lecturing and his practice." ~Publishers Weekly WHY I WROTE A BOOK ABOUT VIKTOR FRANKL Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living (Clarion Books, 2006) is my first book. It is a Young Adult biography of a man who survived four concentration camps in the Holocaust. He believed that people could survive almost any situation or meet it with dignity, if they could find meaning in it. He wrote, "Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." After his release from the camps, Viktor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, a deeply moving and hopeful account of his ordeal. The book has inspired millions of people around the world. As a school counselor, I have read and re-read Man’s Search for Meaning for my own inspiration. I told parts of Viktor’s story to my students when they told me about situations that gave them feelings of hopelessness. I hoped it would inspire them as it had me. It was on the day that I helped one of my students into an ambulance that I decided I would write Frankl’s biography for young people. Tommy (not the boy’s real name) was in eighth grade at the time, and he felt there was no future for him in our small New Mexico community. He was quietly destroying his life by sniffing inhalants. As I walked back into the school on that beautiful spring day, I knew that I would start writing this book that summer. Tommy returned to school with a different outlook after a month in treatment, and we had several good talks about his future. He went on to high school the next year. "Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for."~Viktor Frankl AWARDS • Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People by the National Council for the Social Studies and Children's Book Council, 2007 • Bank Street Best Children's Books of the Year, 2007 • New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, 2007 • Society of School Librarians International Honor Book, 2007 |
|
