A funny, sometimes horrifying look at the inner workings of international government agencies.
How exactly Levey, a 25-year-old Canadian of Jewish descent, got a job with the Israeli mission to the United Nations is never made clear—to him or to us. He applied for an internship while attending law school in New York and, after being told they didn’t offer internships, was inexplicably hired as the consulate’s head speechwriter. Judging from his account of the UN, the employees at this global association of governments devoted as much time to hijinks as to maintaining peace and equity around the world. Levey offers amusing anecdotes about wacky co-workers, and he makes speechwriting seem cooler than even Aaron Sorkin imagined with tales of security screenings, UN seating arrangements that recalled junior high school and the self-defense training he underwent in Israel (in the company of Radiohead’s tour manager). But when the author describes being dispatched to a meeting about a resolution he’d never heard of, having to guess wildly at Israel’s vote, then learning that the vote was about weapons of mass destruction, readers may find the hijinks less amusing. Levey’s good humor, and the narrative’s energy, falter a bit in later sections, which chronicle his work in Israel as a speechwriter for former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He became disillusioned with the country, and Sharon had a stroke, but these events are related more wearily than the author’s earlier adventures.
Read it for the hilarity and the keen portraiture, but try to pretend these people don’t actually make decisions about the fate of the world.Pub Date: April 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5613-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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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