Live Now: Inspiring Accounts of Overcoming Adversity

by George Klein

Why do some individuals triumph in situations that would physically or emotionally destroy most people? When tremendous physical, psychological, or emotional adversity threatens to destroy us, how can we hold on, gather strength, and conquer the obstacles in our path? Could "flow" be the way out an antidote to the poisons of our time?

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.

311 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1997

About the author

George Klein, Georg Klein or Klein György (July 28, 1925) was a Hungarian-Swedish biologist who specialized in cancer research. Klein had also authored a dozen of non-scientific or wide ranging books, of which several are collections of essays.

Klein started a tumor biology center at Karolinska Institute and made a connection there between the Epstein-Barr virus and lymphomas and other cancers. He was awarded the $100,000 prize by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation for pioneering work on cancer and the human immunity system.

Apart from his scientific work, he had written popular books of which three have been translated to English: The Atheist and the Holy City (1990) (Swedish: Ateisten och den heliga staden), Pietà (1992), a collection of essays on whether life is worth living, and Live Now (1997).

Since settling in Sweden in 1947, Klein has spelled his surname Georg in Swedish and George in English.