A likable memoir, full of the author’s love of life, even if it often covers familiar territory.
Walter’s debut memoir, set in post–World War II America, delves into the importance of faith and self-reliance.
The author grew up in a classic 1950s family in a small town in Colorado, and he had loving parents, “three square meals a day, warm clothes, a home with enough beds for everyone and a real sense of pride in America.” Walter takes us back to a simpler time in this memoir, when people could leave their cars unlocked and didn’t overprotect their children, and the country rose to global economic and cultural dominance. The text moves from story to story, using folksy colloquialisms reminiscent of a kind grandfather’s, and a running theme becomes clear: God, the author writes, has provided the author with blessings—miracles and angels—despite his wavering (and sometimes nonexistent) belief in the Almighty. He depicts his life as being guided by an unseen hand to happiness and joy, from his birth in the United States, to his success in business, to meeting his wife. Walter’s previously written articles about faith are included throughout, including such maxims as “a good wife will always let you know you're unzipped before you leave the house.” Some readers may find it corny, but they’ll also enjoy the author’s comfortable, casual style as he episodically relates his life story. Critical readers, though, may find the memoir to be an unconvincing argument for faith and may merely regard it as one man’s trip through America’s past—which may seem a bit too idyllic. That said, the author truly believes in his faith and loves telling his story, and his pleasure may become the reader’s.
A likable memoir, full of the author’s love of life, even if it often covers familiar territory.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477498231
Page Count: 326
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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