Those who enjoy Lamott’s consistently self-deprecating humor, vulnerability, and occasional nuggets of positivity will enjoy...
Another distillation of the author’s life philosophy.
As a gift to her grandson and niece, novelist and nonfiction writer Lamott (Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy, 2017, etc.) sets out to record “everything I know about almost everything.” The result is an obsessively inward-focusing hodgepodge of life stories, advice, and ramblings. Though hope is the author’s tagline and even the title of her concluding chapter, readers find her struggling through virtually every life event, buried in anxieties. Lamott explains early on that she was struck to hear a child say the words, “I has [sic] value.” She realized that it “would have completely changed my life had I heard and internalized [that idea] as a child.” The incident serves to clarify the author’s central struggle: a lifelong search for self-value. Her writing cries out for an internal peace she cannot find. In a chapter on family, she focuses mainly on conflict with her uncle, whom she once called “a scumbutt” in a moment of anger, which affected her for decades. In a chapter on God, which the author defines in a number of nebulous ways, she focuses on an atheist friend who committed suicide. Another chapter is centered entirely around dieting and body image, revealing another self-esteem pitfall, and Lamott devotes an entire chapter to her unabashed hatred of Donald Trump—though she refuses to use his name, as if she were discussing Voldemort. The author’s view of life is often depressing; she refers to it as “this sometimes grotesque amusement park,” and she answers the question, “how did we all get so screwed up?” with, “life just damages people. There is no way around this. Not all the glitter and concealer in the world can cover it up.”
Those who enjoy Lamott’s consistently self-deprecating humor, vulnerability, and occasional nuggets of positivity will enjoy her latest; others will be adrift.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-53744-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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