Tuesday 22 May 2012

86/111 - Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl


Someone lent me this book quite recently so I decided to read it almost immediately so that I could get it back to them. We had been having a conversation about existentialism (which I don’t know anything about) and she recommended this to me.

The book is half memoir, half psychology textbook. Viktor is a Holocaust survivor, and for the first half of the book, he uses his experiences of life in Auschwitz to try to explain how he used existentialism as a way to help him survive. I can’t remember too much about how he relates the theory to his experiences, mostly because everything else was drowned out by how horrible his life was during that time. I probably just didn’t understand the theory enough, and to be honest, I skipped a lot of the second half of the book as it was fairly dry and I didn’t understand it enough to enjoy it. Maybe I’ll try starting somewhere more basic.

Next: Fatherland by Robert Harris

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