The centenarian Delany sisters’ amanuensis (Having Our Say, 1997, etc.) acts as interlocutor for another tenacious woman of color.
Marion “Strong Medicine” Gould is a member of the Lenni-Lenape tribe, the Native Americans who surrendered Manhattan Island for that fabled $24. The 84-year-old speaks candidly, without complaint, of her hardscrabble life in rural New Jersey, the region her people have inhabited for countless generations. Strong Medicine toiled successively at a Birds Eye factory (counting peas to be frozen), in a laundry (evading customers’ bedbugs) and in a sewing factory (prevailing over racial prejudice). Life was good with husband Wilbur, a World War II hero, and their extended family. Other proud moms may brag of a doctor or lawyer, but few can boast, like Strong Medicine, of her son the Indian Chief. (“Indian” is a term she uses with pride throughout the book.) It was Chief Mark “Quiet Hawk” Gould who, adhering to the old traditions, gave his mother her Indian name when she was in her 50s; she agrees it’s a good one. The matriarch is an avid cook, especially of succotash and macaroni and cheese. She discourses on homeopathic pharmacopoeia, evoking her heritage in herbal medicine. Her faith seems to be a Native American branch of Christianity, paying particular heed to the Creator. The Lenni-Lenape eschew easy wealth associated with gambling. Be helpful, watch the kids, respect the Elders and leave the important doings to the women: “It’s the Indian way,” says the Chief’s mother. As she describes it, life in Hearth’s Bridgeton, N.J., seems reminiscent of the rural idyll Thornton Wilder painted in Our Town. Maybe that’s the point, for as Elder Strong Medicine says, “It’s very pleasant to lead a simple life.”
Pertinent life lessons that go down easily.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9779-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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BOOK REVIEW
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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