Impeccable research informs a prose that sings, whirls, and delights. (10 photos, not seen)
Lively, literate biography of the incredible Sarah Breedlove, who rose from perfect poverty to create her own hair-care business and build a mansion on the Hudson.
“There has never been anyone like her,” declares novelist Lowry (The Track of Real Desires, 1994, etc.; Creative Nonfiction/George Mason Univ.) of the African-American entrepreneur praised by the National Association of Colored Women as “the foremost business woman of our race.” Charging into her story with boundless energy and a bountiful imagination, the author employs all her considerable artistic and scholarly skills to uncover the rough edges of a life smoothed over in her subject’s promotional materials. A consummate businesswoman who took the surname of her third husband and declared herself “Madam,” Walker frequently lied to journalists, and many details of her life cannot be verified. Not for lack of effort on the part of Lowry, who chased Walker all over the country—from her birth in 1867 and her childhood on the Mississippi to her years in St. Louis, Denver, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and New York City—digging in public records, reading old newspapers, trying to establish a sturdy foundation on which to erect the edifice of her story. When Lowry cannot uncover fact, her fecund imagination suffices: “[We] engage in storytelling and educated guesswork,” she states, and one magnificent example is her stunning set piece about doing wash in pre-Maytag days (Walker spent years as a washerwoman). The author chronicles the long and uneasy relationship between Walker and Booker T. Washington, who was never comfortable around this determined, ambitious woman. Throughout, Lowry weaves in depressing data about lynchings and racial murders. She includes characters as diverse as the two Johnsons (Jack and James Weldon), but the focus always remains sharply on Walker, on the development and marketing of her hair-care products, and on her wastrel daughter A’Lelia, who frittered away her mother’s fortune. (A’Lelia gets more sympathetic treatment in Ben Neihart’s Rough Amusements, p. 213.)
Impeccable research informs a prose that sings, whirls, and delights. (10 photos, not seen)Pub Date: April 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-44642-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
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