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

challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

This book is split into a few parts. I only read the first part of the book: Experiences in a Concentration Camp. This is the original book that Frankl wrote. Later on, other parts of the book about logotherapy were added. I read a bit from these parts but it was personally of no interest to me to read about it. But since I am rating the whole book and I was only interested in half of the book, I deduced 0.25 from my rating. 

The first part was a unique experience to read. It was written as a combination of a narrative and a psychological analysis of this narrative. Frankl wrote about his own experiences in the different Concentration camps and what he did to mentally survive. The book teaches the reader a lot about life in a concentration camp and how it was organized from the prisoner's perspective. 

The book is also full of great quotes from other people. My personal favorites were:
The story about the death in Teheran. A short story that highlights that people should let fate run its course. 
It did not really matter what we expected of life, but rather what life expected from us. 
What you have experienced, no power on earth can take away from you.

I have visited the Dachau concentration camp, the camp where Frankl was liberated from. This made reading the book a bit extra special, since I was aware of how to camp looked and I have walked around it myself. This also made me rethink my visit and the next time I will visit a concentration camp, I am sure to have this book in the back of my mind. 
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