Moving and perceptive—a delightful, engaging memoir on aging.
Educator Kohl (She Would Not Be Moved, 2005, etc.) returns to the classroom, this time as a student of Chinese landscape painting.
Approaching his seventh decade, the author realized that the impression he had of himself as a “middle-aged guy” was at odds with society’s perception of him as old. He was feeling tired and vulnerable, worn down by his battles with the University of San Francisco administration over his social-justice program. As he wandered Clement Street in a predominantly Asian area of the city, Kohl noticed a storefront art school and decided to enroll. He hoped to learn more about landscape painting, which he had long admired; he also anticipated finding a fellow student who could teach him Chinese chess. When Kohl arrived for his first lesson, however, he discovered that all the other students were children, ages four to seven. Over the course of three years, the author learned the rituals and techniques of brush painting, moving from sketching monkeys and pandas to rendering graceful forests of bamboo. “I soon discovered that it was very difficult to breathe life into a bamboo,” he writes, “to have it move with wind, to have it serene on a quiet day, to have it bursting with leaves or barren or budding.” As the author relinquished his need to teach and learned to relish his role as student (albeit one who stuck out), the class served as a template for aging with enthusiasm and grace. The conclusion shows Kohl leaving the university to rebuild his professional life, re-energized by his experience and eager to embrace whatever time is left to him.
Moving and perceptive—a delightful, engaging memoir on aging.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59691-052-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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