This posthumously published collection of narratives provides footnotes on the life immortalized through American Splendor.
The pride of Cleveland and patriarch of the autobiographical comic-book narrative worked with New York artist Summer McClinton on pieces that generally reflect his life through the stories of others whom he found interesting. The opener, “Hollywood Bob,” tells the story of Cleveland’s limo driver to the stars (and to Pekar), an ex-con who ended up befriending many of the famous people he drove (including Meg Ryan, who doesn’t look familiar in McClinton’s rendering, and Leslie Nielsen, who gave the driver a “fart machine”). Then there’s a series of narratives on “Tunc & Eileen” and their many changes of jobs and partners before finding each other and telling their stories to Pekar. “Neighborhood Spark Plug” is the most compelling of the narratives, detailing the life of one of Pekar’s buddies and his ill-fated adventures in trying to restore and relocate a diner before returning to an expanded version of his toy store with delights for adult collectors. The longest and last piece is the title story, recounting Pekar’s trip to a book festival in West Virginia, after the interest from the film version of American Splendor had died down (and his speaking fee had dropped from the thousands into the hundreds). Like much of the collection, it’s a minor slice of life that doesn’t really build to any particular point, except as the book reflects the narrator’s obsession “to get the details of the story right.”
Pekar fans will enjoy this minor work from a major figure.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-49941-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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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