I enjoyed reading Part One and I felt a bit bored when I read Part Two.Overall, this is one of the best books to tell the living experience in the WWII concentration camp in Auschwitz where there are horrible places such as gas chambers, crematoriums, and massacres.They can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what h...

There’s a joy at once fierce and quiet in feeling profoundly rearranged by your encounter with a book. In understanding, with certainty, in the deep core of your heart, that the you who first entered this book exists at a distance of several hundred pages: you’re not the same person, you’ve changed—been changed—in ways you cannot explain but which you will always carry with you. I might have finished this book but I feel like it’s only just begun me.Man’s Search for Meaning weaves together compe...

في رصيد قراءاتي السنوي تبزغ ثلاثة إلى أربعة كتب لتشكّل نقط ارتكاز؛ مكان أعود إليه ذهنيًا من أجل التشافي. هذا واحد من تلك الكتب التي تعيدك إلى العالم بعد تسليحك. لو لم يكن فيكتور فرانكل قد جرب الاعتقال في أربع معسكرات للنازية من بينها أوشفتز، لبدا كل ما كتبه من قبيل المثالية الكاذبة. لكنها ليست كذلك؛ فالمؤلف ابن التجربة، والقدرة على إيجاد معنى (حتى في قلب المعاناة) هو ما يحصّننا ضد السقوط في الفراغ الوجودي - وباء العصر وقبل الكورونا حتى.يقلب د. فرانكل الطاولة على منطق الضحية؛ فسؤال "ما معنى الحيا...

If someone asks me to recommend the best three books related to the Second World War and the horrors of the holocaust, this book will be one among them. Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian Neurologist and Psychiatrist. He was also a Holocaust survivor. This book describes his experiences in concentration camps in the first section and the logotherapy he developed for finding meaning in all forms of existence during the suffering in the second section. My favorite three lines from this book...

The original part one was the strongest I think because the rest started to go into the typical psychobabble inherent to books trying to contribute to the academic side of psychology or psychiatry but the first part really grounded the idea of giving meaning to one existence into personal experience and I found it very poignant about the mental state of people in very stressful and hopeless situations. It's a very empowering and important idea that no matter the situation a person can control th...

I have to separate the emotional impact of the first half of the book from my overall impression on how effective the book was as a whole. It's really difficult not to find stories of the holocaust incredibly gripping, and the way in which Frankl speaks of his experience is inspiring and yet still maintains that gravity you'd expect from such a narrative.However, the latter half of the book delves much more into a psychological, and less personal, examination of 'logotherapy' (that is, the autho...

How is it possible to write dispassionately of life in a concentration camp in such a way as to engender great feeling in the reader? This is how Frankl dealt with his experience of those terrible years. The dispassionate writing makes the horrors of the camp extremely distressing, more so than writing that is more emotionally involved. It is almost reportage. The first half of the book is equal in its telling to The Diary of a Young Girl in furthering our understanding of those dreadful times.T...

For most of the book, I felt as dumbfounded as I would have been if I were browsing through a psychiatric journal. Filled with references and technical terms and statistics, it was mostly a book-long affirmation of the then innovative technique called 'logo-therapy'. I do not understand how this book is still relevant and found in most popular book stores. It might have been that the book was popular in the sixties and seventies as it offered a powerful and logical argument against the reduction...

I read this book for the first time during my senior year in high school. The year prior, I had gone to Germany for spring break with some fellow classmates. During the trip, we spent a day visiting a former WWII concentration camp in Dachau. As one might expect, this visit had a profound effect on me. I had of course read and knew about the atrocities that occurred under the Nazi regime, but to actually see a camp in person is a deeply haunting and disturbing experience. Perhaps for this reason...

After I read this book, which I finished many, many years ago, I had become self-critical of any future endeavours which would take up a lot of my time. I would ask myself "is this or will this be meaningful to me?", and if the answer was "no", I wouldn't do it. It was this book that influenced me to consciously live as meaningful a life as possible, to place a great value on the journey and not just the destination, while knowing that "meaningful" doesn't always mean "enjoyable". "Meaningful" s...