Imaginative, piercing portrayal of a man shadowed by merciless demons.
British homeless advocate Masters crafts an unconventional biography of a man who raged not only at the dying of the light but often at the very light itself.
The first-time author worked on Stuart Shorter’s story for several years, experiencing the frustrations and occasional joys of a close association with someone caught in chaos. When Masters finished a first draft, he showed it to Stuart, who said it was boring and should be organized more like a thriller or detective novel that worked backwards through events until the discovery of the Truth. One of the charms of this book is that Stuart comments occasionally about the current draft, offering suggestions, sniffing derisively or dismissively about the text. “In biography, most of the time, the real person is a nuisance,” Masters sighs. Stuart was indeed a most difficult case. Sexually abused by a brother and babysitter, addicted to glue-sniffing as a teen (and, later, to just about every other substance), a continual runaway, a habitual jailbird, a sometimes violent denizen of the streets, a common and an uncommon criminal, he was somehow likable as well. Masters claims he was never afraid of Stuart, with whom he shared quarters and close contact. The author does work backwards, sort of, in this final version. He begins in the present and ends with Stuart’s very obscure early childhood. Masters also keeps us apprised of what’s going on at the moment and offers a running commentary on the progress of his writing—a sort of meta-biography. His research included studying books about homelessness and the psychology (or pathology) of the abused, examining court and school records and reading articles. When Stuart is killed by a train (accident rather than suicide, it seems), Masters knows that the Truth he has been pursuing will forever elude him.
Imaginative, piercing portrayal of a man shadowed by merciless demons.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-34000-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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