Informational rather than inspirational, a journal about journal-writing as a spiritual search, by a teacher of creative writing at Foothill College in Los Altos, Calif. From fall 1987 to summer 1988, Holzer kept two journals: one a record of her writing progress, the other a personal chronicle she hoped to keep separate from the first. In the book, however, they overlap; the personal journal creeps into the creative one, which becomes, for her, a mystical journey. She records dreams, her sense of aloneness, winter sorrows; she stops torturing herself about what exactly she is doing by reminding herself ``a journal can be anything!'' Reviewing the ``vision quest'' of her journal, she notes patterns and turns of character. She finds herself preparing for the inevitable end result of her father's lingering mortal illness and grieving for a dead brother, a doctor who was killed by a snow-grooming machine during the Olympic games in Calgary, Canada—a death prefigured by a dream she recorded in her journal. She visualizes his hands being whole, ``his good hands that had held so many.'' Later she refers to another painful memory: ``Perhaps my uterus wants to cry the story of the child I lost, of what wanted to be formed, and what slipped out into darkness before it could be held securely by the arms near the heart....And maybe I need to discover that this big boulder sitting in my throat consists of a huge mass of words, compacted into stone.'' Sometimes she takes her students for a walk in the woods or fields and, to expose them to nature writing, reads them haiku by Basho. Although this is more a public record of private thoughts than a how-to book, the use of Latinate words and catch phrases like ``creative process'' and ``learning process'' at times gives it an academic tone somewhat at odds with the personal nature of the material. Creativity ought to be more interesting than this.
Pub Date: June 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-88096-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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