A review by jpowerj
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

5.0

It feels... really weird to try to rate this book. It's not like most other books, trying to tell a story enjoyable to the reader or trying to convince the reader of something. It's the literary cry of someone who has been through enough pain to last a thousand lifetimes, and is trying to find something, anything of value in what he had to endure. It's interesting, actually - the most morbid and heart-wrenching parts of the book are not the unspeakable acts of violence or indifference to human life Frankl witnessed, but rather it's the way that he and so many others became totally desensitized to them. It's the strangest experience, reading passages about people starving to death or finding their body parts swelling and decaying with malnourishment, that are written as if he was writing about some ho-hum experience like taking a nap or waiting in line for something. Extremely jarring. I think this is a book that anyone who wants a truly unflinching expose on the evil that humans are capable of needs to read.