Live Now ― Inspiring Accounts of Overcoming Adversity

As the twentieth century draws to a close, a quick review of its major events reveals a death toll associated with far too many of them. Two world wars, a cold war, and numerous, smaller (yet still deadly) "hot wars" reflect the brutality of an age. But despite the widespread inhumanity epitomized by the Holocaust (which George Klein, the author, himself barely escaped), some individuals have triumphed over situations that would physically or emotionally destroy most others. How does this happen? What gives these remarkable people the ability to persevere against the most impossible odds?
Live Now: Inspiring Accounts of Overcoming Adversity answers these questions by offering the fascinating and moving stories of three men close to the author. These men, "flow addicts," to use the terminology of psychologist and author of the book's foreword Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, survive through intense concentration, through selflessness, and through a genuine altruism. The first, Ali Elovic, fought on several fronts in World War II and was forced to endure the horrors of Nazi and Communist prisons, but still maintained his thirst for life, emerging as a successful businessman. The second, Nobel Prize-winning virologist Carleton Gajdusek, used his extraordinary scientific talent to escape conventional life and to provide a home and education to more than thirty youths from "primitive" cultures in New Zealand, Australia, and other places. The third, Klein's Uncle Miska, lost his entire family as well as his whole ethnic and religious group to the Holocaust, yet he was able to return to his home village, all alone, and become the universally loved director of the region.
These men, in order to escape sorrow and weariness, chose an active commitment, a psychological state of timelessness and euphoria, that imparted tremendous inner strength and provided an antidote to the poisons of our times. Through the examples of their lives, readers can learn to achieve the same.

George Klein is a professor and research group leader at the Microbiology and Tumorbiology Center at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.