One man’s slow drift away from the faith of his father.
Looking back on his younger years, biographer Lax (Conversations with Woody Allen, 2007, etc.) provides an intriguing coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Vietnam era. The son of an Episcopal priest, religion played an important role in much of the author’s life, but it is not always at the center of this autobiography. Lax begins with his childhood as the son of two models of Christian piety. Through his parents the author learned about integrity and loving his neighbor, and it was because of their good example that he accepted the Christian faith without question. He entered Hobart College in 1962 and things began to change: “The Book of Common Prayer, where I had been content to find my answers, was suddenly a slim volume indeed.” After Hobart, Lax was faced with the formidable quandary of his day, Vietnam and the draft. He struggled with the decision of whether or not to declare himself a conscientious objector, and whether his growing pacifist beliefs were indeed genuine or self-serving. To avoid both the draft and the conscientious-objector question for a time, he enrolled in the Peace Corps. Assigned to the Truk Islands in Micronesia, Lax spent two years on a tiny island of 185 inhabitants. This tale alone provides a fascinating core for the book, but Lax also juxtaposes his experiences with those of a close friend who enrolled as an Army officer in Vietnam. His friend returned from an intense and horrifying war experience and entered seminary, while Lax came back from the Peace Corps and eventually applied for conscientious-objector status. As his friend became a priest and then a bishop, Lax’s faith slowly receded, and the book comes to a melancholy end with the death of his parents.
A well-written autobiography, artfully folding in another’s story, and alternate course, along with the author’s own.Pub Date: April 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27091-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
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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 20, 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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