A well-balanced memoir that fits one family into a larger picture.
From author Good (Robert Good and His Descendants, 2011) comes a memoir about growing up in 1940s America and his personal search for religious truth.
Having lived at some 31 addresses by the age of 20, the author had a childhood marked by frequent moves, from an assortment of small towns in Arkansas to a planned community in Washington state to the humming metropolis of Portland, Oregon. The author saw a range of places throughout his formative years, as his religious father moved the family either closer to a job (security guard for a military site during World War II, for instance) or farther away from something he despised (e.g., the decadence of a city like Portland). Detailing such events as a train ride from the segregated American South to the desegregated American Northwest—the conductor even had to announce when the border had been crossed—this story becomes one about a family’s ability to cope with both geographical and national change, with a deeply personal thread, particularly with the great attention paid to the author’s father. From his refusal to tip—“he didn’t leave a tip because he didn’t believe in receiving or giving charity”—to his disgust for churches that featured piano music in their services, the author’s father emerges as a cantankerous, hardworking, difficult yet touching figure. Though distrusting of any preacher not affiliated with the Church of Christ, his father was filled at times with religious fervor; his occasionally peculiar beliefs (such as his refusal to drink Coca-Cola based on the idea that a high-ranking executive at the company might be an atheist) helped spark a religious fascination in his son. The author, who believed through most of his childhood that he would one day become a preacher, compellingly details his experiences as a child trying to grapple with thornier biblical issues and the lack of assistance he received from adults. Culminating in brief passages about his adulthood, the book amounts to a swift, readable account of one man’s experiences growing up in the early days of postwar America.
A well-balanced memoir that fits one family into a larger picture.Pub Date: March 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1458202536
Page Count: 216
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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