A witty expedition into the wilds of Austen City Limits, where there’s no such thing as being too obsessed with the author of Pride and Prejudice.
Although barely known in her lifetime, the works of Jane Austen (1775–1817) were so popular within a century of her death that the term “Janeite” was coined to describe a devoted fan. Yaffe (Other People's Children: The Battle for Justice and Equality in New Jersey's Schools, 2007) explores the dimensions of modern Jane-o-mania, her own included. There’s the Jane Austen Society of North America, whose members (Yaffe among them) spend months acquiring just the right Regency gown for the annual gala. There are regular visitors to the Republic of Pemberley website who argue the finer points of Mansfield Park well into the wee hours. We meet Cisco Systems co-founder Sandy Lerner, who spent $20 million of her buyout money on the purchase and renovation of Austen’s Chawton House in England. We also meet readers who simply love the stories, fan-fiction writers (some quite successful) who indulge them, and serious academics who loathe both. On the other extreme are people who read too much between the lines, like the full-time explicator who sees every Austen novel as a labyrinth of subtle clues, disclosing a “shadow story” of family abuse beneath the surface romance. Others similarly create Austen in their own image: A nurse practitioner sees “borderline personality disorder” in the female characters; a speech pathologist thinks Mr. Darcy has mild autism. For Yaffe and others, there’s a constant tug of war between sharing Jane with the world and keeping her for one’s self.
Yaffe honors her hero throughout: a smart reader and a shrewd but sympathetic judge of character who knows that Austenophilia has its own laws of attraction.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-75773-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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 19, 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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