Man's Search for Meaning (OLD EDITION/OUT OF PRINT) Paperback – June 1, 2006

It's not exactly a review but some thoughts after reading this book and observing current events.Can you imagine life being upended in a matter of weeks? You were forced to board a train to Auschwitz for a new life of unknowns. When you arrived, you were either directed to the left or to the right. You and your family were separated. You were instructed to go right while the rest of your family were instructed to go left. The life for the right group turned out to be half a decade of dehumanizing tortures. As for the left group, they were murdered within 24 hours of arrival to Auschwitz. You learned about the fate of the left group by realizing what all the smokes were rising above the structure your family went into. I was in shock and disbelief when I read about this in Man’s Search for Meaning but this crazy thing DID happen 80 years ago, just a few years before my parents were born. How could this world be so barbaric?Before Auschwitz, most people were living a fairly normal life worrying about paying their bills, raising their family, advancing their careers, etc just like us ordinary beings today. People know there’s war but I doubt people thought about how they could be swallowed by the wars in a matter of weeks started by sinister people who only care about their own power. The whole thing is just insane and ridiculous and you would hope humanity learned its lessons. Nonetheless, 80 years later, we are back to square one. The war in Ukraine is ruthless and absurd. It destroyed a country where hardworking people falsely thought they could live in peace and prosperity. The Russian soldiers are asked to invade and to do cruel things Putin asked them to do: murdering, vandalizing, setting things on fire and destructing instructures that took years to build. I don’t think these Russian soldiers out of their own will would want to do this. What exactly is this evil power force making people do crazy and destructive things? Is it really just Putin? Or somehow our world allows this to happen.This reminds me of the story Haruki Murakami wrote about his father. His father was forced to go to China to fight the war for Japan during WWII. He was a 19 year-old, having grown up in a Buddha temple in Kyoto. Despite the Buddhist teachings, he was forced to go to war by the government. His father witnessed the killing of Chinese prisoners of war and might even be forced to do the executions. Part of the military training at the time was for new soldiers to practice killing POW to get them into “the zone”, to become a competent fighter. His father told Murakami about this and this made a huge impression on him. He could sense his father was deeply affected by this experience for the rest of his life, with grief and guilt. After all, he was complicit. But he as an individual had no choice. If the government forced him to choose war, he could not choose peace instead. If the government goes completely insane, we as citizens have no recourse.As I am typing this up, I am wondering how long the peaceful life we have in America would last. Three months ago most Ukrainian people probably couldn’t imagine what lay ahead. Should I worry about my family in Taiwan? Things can change drastically in a very short period of time. My husband and his family left Vietnam in 1982 to escape communism. They endured several years of communism rule and my father in law was jailed for a couple of years for “helping Americans”. Prior to the communist takeover, the family ran a large rice mill and owned a substantial amount of prime real estate in Saigon. Then Americans left. Overnight they lost all their assets to the communist regime. They went from a materially rich life to a life of hunger and partial homelessness. Young women had to hide to avoid being raped. My mother in law sold her gold jewelry in the black market to get her husband out of jail and the family escaped to America penniless. Who is responsible for all the sufferings? They did nothing wrong. They were hardworking people running an honest business. Perhaps they didn’t pay enough attention to international politics. But the price they had to pay was absurdly high.We individuals are so small and powerless we don’t know what current of our crazy time can swallow us despite our innocence and futile efforts. The thought that we are in control is an illusion. When I think about the great suffering in Auschwitz, China, Vietnam and endless other man-made tragedies, I am so grateful for the peaceful time I still live in and whatever worries I have seem so trivial. If we strive for anything for the world, we should strive for peace.

A classic that never disappoints. Ordered new copy for my collection. Can't ho wrong if a gift os needed too.Great book that has stood the hands of time.

This book arrived ahead of schedule and in excellent condition. The book is a must-read. Despite it being written so long ago, it holds significant relevance for today’s world. Very powerful.

This 2008 edition of Frankl's 1945 book is a must read for every human being who wants to lift their spirit in moments of despair. The book is structured in three different parts. The first one (Experiences in a Concentration Camp) and the Postscript (The case for a Tragic Optimism) fit beautifully together, and are the basis of Frankl's philosophy and psychotherapy system called Logotherapy. They are narrated in a very conversational way because they are, after all, a memoir. They differ greatly in style and tone from the second part (Logotherapy in a Nutshell), which is a summary of Frankl's therapy system, partially based on Frankl's experiences and observations as Auschwitz inmate, and partially on techniques and views of the world that he had started elaborating before he was sent to the camp. This part is drier in style, way more technical and not as approachable for the reader, unless the reader is really into therapy or a therapist. Harold Kushner's preface to this 2008 edition is a good summary of the book main points, while Frankl's preface to the 1992 edition summarizes well how the book and Logotherapy came to be. The book has many pearls of wisdom, and is very uplifting despite the brutality of what we read. In all honesty, I already expected that when I picked up the book. Some prisoner's stories are utterly poetic despite their tragedy. I'm glad that those people's historical memoirs had been so beautifully preserved. On the other hand, this is a survivor's first-person narration of the events, so that allows for invaluable insights into the reality of the extermination camps and into the inmates' mental/emotional state and fortune.Since we live in 2021 and we're pretty aware of the Nazis' atrocities, most of the things that Frankl tells about his experience are somewhat lessened by the impact on the reader of dozens of documentaries and movies on WW2. It might have been chilling reading the book in the postwar era, when all the details were still unfolding and the wold came to realize what had really happened. What we didn't know before reading the book is that a new therapeutic model, Logotherapy, was greatly influenced by the Jew's suffering in Auschwitz, and that there is hope even in the biggest moments of despair. For the rest, Frank's take on life is admirable and full of wisdom, whether you are into Logotherapy or not. I especially liked his comments on love, the youth and unemployment, as they are still, more than half a century later, valid. LOGOTHERAPY, SOME CORE PRINCIPLES AND POINTS I LIKE> The great task for any person is to find meaning in his/her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: Work (doing something significant), Love (caring for another person), and Courage in difficult times.> Suffering is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.> You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.> Logotherapy aims to curing the soul by leading it to find meaning in life.> What matters is to make the best of any given situation.> Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.> The aim of life is not to be happy as the seeking of happiness can increase someone's unhappiness.> Suffering is unavoidable, is part of life, and we need to accept it and re-frame it.> Tragic optimism, i.e., one remains optimistic in spite of the “tragic triad, or those aspects of human existence which may be circumscribed by: (1) pain; (2) guilt; and (3) death and that we should say 'yes' to life in spite of all that.> To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic. > Success cannot be pursued but it is an end result that the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.There are hundreds of pearls of wisdom that I cannot reproduce here because it would take too long, but those are the ones that made me read the book in the first place.SOME CRITIQUEFrankl poignantly mentions that despite all the inmates being subject to the harsh situations (food and sleep deprivation, hard-work labor, extreme cold, beatings, etc.) some died and some survived, and he ways that, many of those who died did so because they gave up on life and lose hope in getting alive out of the camps and resuming their lives after the war.I love most of what Frankl says and his attitude towards life. However, we cannot say that Frankl survived just because he had a specific mindset, hopes of getting alive, finding his family and publishing the basics of Logotherapy included in this edition, which he had already started writing before being taken to the camp. First of all, he was an intellectual and a psychiatrist, i.e. a person with a strong mind, mentally s stable with enough intellectual harnesses to re-frame anything in his head to give it meaning. He certainly was an optimistic, like it's in his nature. Not everyone was so well equipped mentally and emotionally. What's more, there must have been other people who, like him, had hopes of surviving, seeing their families and doing something with their lives in the outside world, but they never made it because, I can only hypothesize, their physique and immune system, as well as their mental state weren't Frankl's.