Live Now: Inspiring Accounts of Overcoming Adversity by George Klein answers these questions by offering the fascinating and moving stories of three men who were close to the author and who conquered their separate demons. One man fought on several fronts of the Second World War, experienced the horrors of Nazi and later Communist prisons, but maintained his thirst for and enjoyment of life and emerged as a successful businessman and world traveler. The second man, Nobel laureate Carleton Gajdusek. used his extraordinary scientific talent to escape conventional life and its boredom. The third, Klein's uncle, lost his whole family in the Holocaust but still found the inner strength to continue living alone in his home village, even though his entire ethnic and religious group and its culture had been destroyed.
In order to escape sorrow and weariness, they chose an active commitment-a psychological state of intense concentration, timelessness, and euphoria-which imparted tremendous inner strength. They are continuously looking for challenging tasks that maximize activity and liberate them from the past and the future, permitting them to live here and now.
GEORGE KLEIN (Stockholm, Sweden) is professor and research group leader at the Microbiology and Tumorbiology Center at the Karolinska Institute, the author of The Atheist and The Holy City and Pieta, and a member of the Nobel Assembly.
ISBN 1-57392-154-8 Cloth