The faithful may see an inspiring story of the happy life and untimely death of a little girl whose father will always love...
A father’s loving tribute to his angelic daughter who succumbs to brain cancer.
Beaucher details his daughter’s fatal journey from her diagnosis with medulloblastoma at age 2 and a half to her death two months after her ninth birthday. The book is as much a journal of Beaucher’s feelings as it is a chronicle of his daughter’s illness, as much his story as hers. He describes Kristin’s initial symptoms, diagnosis and treatment; the five and a half good years between her remission and relapse; and the last five months after the first signs of the cancer’s return. Beaucher’s voice makes the story feel more like a listen than a read, and his vulnerability and concern for his daughter lend pathos to the narrative. He wrote the book “to show people what she accomplished and how she did it. With the gaze of her eyes, the soft touch of her hand, the soothing sound of her voice, and sometimes not saying a word at all, she changed the outcome of people’s lives…I would say that it was pretty miraculous, don’t you think?” An overabundance of individual thank-you’s litters many of the chapters, and the coverage of events is inconsistent. Beaucher spends a chapter describing how he gets a tattoo of Kristin (a sign from God gave him the go-ahead), but he tucks away in the epilogue a brief mention of his decision to get a divorce from Kristin’s mother and spends little time relating how that affected Kristin, except to say that her prayers brought them back together. Devout readers may gain inspiration in Kristin’s tale, others may tire of Beaucher’s Pollyannaism. But the author never wavers in depicting his daughter as he saw her. “She was perfect in every way, shape, and form…Kristin was the most amazing person I knew.”
The faithful may see an inspiring story of the happy life and untimely death of a little girl whose father will always love her; others will find an overlong fairy tale sadly lacking its happily ever after.Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452045986
Page Count: 268
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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