Washoe County Library System

In a Swiss sanatorium because he has tuberculosis, Hans Castorp meets people whose differing philosophies of life lead him to shape his own. A sanatorium in the Swiss Alps reflects the societal ills of pre-twentieth-century Europe, and a young marine engineer rises from his life of anonymity to become a pivotal character in a story about how a human's environment affects self identity. In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium...