A former actress struggles with a bout of spiritual ennui in this memoir.
Lewis (Between Men, 1995) had a life that most people would envy: she was married to a successful movie producer; enjoyed glamorous careers as an actress, model, and writer; and traveled the globe. However, in 2004, when she was in her 50s, she was struck with regret and furious at the prospect that she had squandered her promise: “Is this it? Is this the life I meant myself to have?” She stumbled upon a book, The Unquiet Grave by the literary critic Cyril Connolly, and she related to his desire for a house in France; later, she was invited to visit an English friend of hers in the French countryside. While there, she fell in love with an old, dilapidated château and decided to buy it as a summer home and oversee its much-needed renovations. The author’s husband was incensed, she says, but he reluctantly paid most of the cost of the house and loaned her a substantial sum for the repairs. Lewis’ memoir jumps back and forth in time, recounting a life of youthful adventure as well as her struggle to superintend an exasperatingly complex construction project. She tells of growing up in England, attending school in France, and eventually becoming a model, a minor actress in mostly B movies, and finally, a serious writer. Along the way, she rubbed shoulders with plenty of celebrities, including Roman Polanski, with whom she says she had an affair, and Orson Welles. The author’s prose is refined and worldly, and she memorably and candidly provides keen insights into the decades she inhabited; for example, her libertine response to her discomfort over the 1960s sexual revolution doubles as astute social commentary. However, some readers may find it difficult to truly empathize with her existential torment, which, given the enormous privilege that she’s enjoyed, seems disconnected from real, abiding struggle. Her life story is a truly fascinating one, and readers may be tempted to wonder why it’s the source of so much frustration.
An account of an extraordinary life, marred by excessive angst.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68245-082-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 20, 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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