Domesticated journalist Tarte follows up his first report on life with critters, Enslaved by Ducks (2003).
The family house in Michigan is home to half-a-dozen indoor birds, mostly parrots, and indoor mammals including cats, rabbits and a skunk. Lodged behind the house is a flock of fowl: ducks, geese and a chicken. The backyard is an animal necropolis. Naturally, Bob and wife Linda, busily tending to their animal charges, just love them all. Reading like a sitcom with a menagerie, the book offers stories of a difficult garden hose, an underfed spider, the eviction of yellow jackets, an adopted apartment-bred duck, a nest of mice in a favorite chair and the tube feeding of an ailing parrot—along with some innocent laughs about Linda’s aching back. A friendly vet ministers to a dying bunny and fixes an egg-bound bird. Mentions of the death of the author’s father and the distressing Alzheimer’s of his increasingly demented mother are certainly troubling, but the text balances them with the comfort of Tarte’s Ark, filled with personable animals like Louie, Ollie, Stanley Sue, “a buff-colored Buff Orpington named Buffy” and a sock monkey. Tarte offers a few bits and pieces concerning humans, but they’re overwhelmed by garrulous pieces about the pets that disappear and appear, clucking, squalling and smelling from basement to attic. The author’s previous work yielded some amusements, but now it’s time to clean house a bit. Tarte’s current presentation of fun with fauna tests just how far personification of animals can go before a grip on normal life begins to loosen.
Best for staunch fanciers of fey animal tales.Pub Date: March 16, 2007
ISBN: 1-56512-502-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
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 19, 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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