An Irishwoman recalls years of travel in this breezy if flawed debut memoir by Doolan-Fox.
Doolan-Fox spent her earliest years living in North London, although her memories of Tottenham are sparse. When her Irish parents returned to Dublin in 1969, Ann, then a wide-eyed 6-year-old, stepped off the boat “seeing everything…in such gigantic form.” She had a modest upbringing and a father who was suffocatingly dictatorial. Her early stories of Dublin are laden with charm, such as when Bono, soon to be frontman of the band U2, would walk by her house each day on his way to school, bearing a downcast expression. Her father’s strictness eventually led her to run away from home at 18 to seek work in London before heading to Milan, where she made a living as a babysitter and a teacher’s assistant. Her wanderlust then took her to Paris, Madrid, New York, and Birmingham, England, before she found a prestigious job working in a patent office in The Hague, Netherlands, where she met her future husband, a U.S. airman. Doolan-Fox’s personable prose oozes with a passion for travel and a distracting penchant for ellipses and exclamation marks: “Gracias Espana!!! Although New York was calling, I would actually return to Madrid just a year later….You will just have to read on to find out how and why…..!!” Disappointingly, her descriptive techniques rely heavily on clichés (on New York: “I have never seen so many throngs of people, spilling out of concrete towers like ants rushing around in every direction”). She also tends to rely on films to convey context or emotion: “It felt for a moment like I had just signed my Life over to a religious sect or something. Have you ever seen the movie ‘The Firm’ with Tom Cruise?”
A colorful, enthusiastic, if not especially original, approach to globe-trotting.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-73238-510-8
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Celtic Road Home
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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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