A lugubrious memoir by a woman who, through psychoanalysis, came to understand how her self-image had been shaped by childhood yearnings for a normal family life—complete with a strong, protective father and a stable, caring mother.
Hughes was only two when her father, a bootlegger, was slain by the Cleveland Mafia. Her mercurial, often hysterical, and frequently bewildered mother (a decidedly unmaternal woman so neglected by her own mother that she was raised in an orphanage) told her that her father had died of pneumonia. While fantasizing that her father was up in heaven keeping an eye on her, Hughes learned to become her own parent, looking after her mother as she longed for her mother to look after her. At 12, her older brother told her the truth about her father's violent death, and newspapers at the public library filled in the sordid details. Anxious to get away from her mother, she got married while still in her teens—to a young man who seemed to offer an escape. Interspersed with chapters about her miserable childhood and her marriage to a domineering husband are her account of sessions with her psychoanalyst: "I ride the analyst's couch and see the murders and my unparented childhood from the safety of that room. . . . I weep for the first time at all my losses." In the long process of analysis, Hughes is able to replace her imaginary father with a realistic assessment of a flawed human being, to forgive her mother for her blighted childhood, to understand what was keeping her in her unhappy marriage, and finally to start a new life.
A minor addition to the literature of dysfunctional families and the damage that parents can do to their children's psyches, this woe-is-me tale with an upbeat ending has little to recommend it.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57962-072-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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 20, 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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