Gently meandering work about writing and remembrance by a beloved American sage and author.
A kind of tongue-in-cheek anti-autobiography, this slender memoir by Wouk (The Lawgiver, 2012, etc.) divides his writing life and influences since he was 12 years old in 1927 (“the year ‘Lucky’ Lindbergh flew over the ocean nonstop to Paris”) between “Sailor,” or how his itinerant real life insinuated itself in his work, and “Fiddler,” the spiritual journey of his later years, as he plunged into Judaism and the saga of Israel. His longtime wife and literary agent (since deceased) used to read everything that he wrote and pounced on his idea of writing his autobiography by reminding him skeptically, “you’re not that interesting a person.” Wouk’s roots as a comedy writer pop up throughout the book. Having grown up in a Bronx Jewish household to Yiddish-speaking parents—his steam-laundry boss Papa regaled the family Friday nights with his readings of Shalom Aleichem—Wouk was steeped early on in folk humor and resolved to be a gagman, hired by “gag czar” David Freedman and then Fred Allen. By 1943, he was scrawling the first page of his first novel, Aurora Dawn (1947), aboard a minesweeper and became a rather accidental novelist, or so he writes about his advance for The Caine Mutiny (1951)—he was “bemused by this windfall of bucks.” Indeed, the author can barely grasp the effort that certainly charged his monumental works of fiction, starting with “the first novel about American Jewry,” Marjorie Morningstar, which put him on the cover of Time. Wouk was first moved to write about the Holocaust by reading Raul Hilberg; from there, he plunged into the “main task,” aka the World War II books. His “Fiddler” years led him to the autobiographical Inside, Outside (1985) and to years of intensive military research for The Hope (1993) and The Glory (1994)—“it’s expected of you,” he was told.
Readers of Wouk will delight in accompanying him through his triumphs and grief.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2854-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
Did you like this book?
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
Did you like this book?
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
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
