A 19th-century unsolved murder is probed in an analysis that makes a good run at being both solidly academic and convincingly mysterious but comes up wanting on both counts. In July 1841, only days after she disappeared, Mary Rogers, known as the ``Beautiful Cigar Girl'' for her work in a tobacconist's shop, was found floating in the Hudson River. Rogers's deathvariously attributed to strangulation (by the Hoboken coroner), drowning (by the New York City coroner), and an unsuccessful abortion (in a witness's deathbed confession)captured public imagination and provided raw material for dramatic renditions ranging from accounts in the penny press to openly fictionalized versions, including Edgar Allen Poe's ``The Mystery of Marie Rogàt.'' Srebnick (History/Montclair State Univ.), who uses the death to explore ``the historical place of women in . . . [that period's] economic and social transformations,'' is particularly interested in how sensational 19th-century accounts portrayed Rogers as either a chaste victim of urban toughs or, conversely, the very embodiment of danger (as an unmarried, sexually active woman). Not unlike the texts she critiques, Srebnick makes Rogers into the person she wants her to be: a member of the historically significant Mather family and a woman whose identity is ``emblematic'' of some important social changes. Where Srebnick might lose casual readers is when she detours into background that isn't always delivered with the intensity of the murder case. She might irk other readers in making questionable conjectural leaps and in not reconciling some details, as when she says that there was little violent death in New York City but also that it was ``not unusual'' for corpses to be found in local waters. Also, Srebnick uses her facts selectively, ignoring some that don't contribute to her greater purpose. A reminder that the past is unknowable and that history is whatever historians say it is.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-506237-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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