Former race car driver and avid flier Coristine combines lyrical prose, stunning visuals and evocative melodies to open up a window on his favorite place in the entire world—tiny Raleigh Island on the St. Lawrence River.
Few ever get a chance to own their own island, and fewer still ever get the opportunity to render it as lovingly as Coristine and co-author Inglehart have done here. Had Coristine restricted himself to traditional publishing, his personal story and how he arrived on Raleigh after reinventing himself following a failed racing career would have been a significant triumph all on its own. The author traveled a hard road as a younger man dreaming of the checkered flag. Some who accompanied him along the way didn’t make it. The app’s interactive components lend a sense of splendid immediacy to that mournful past while creating an overall sense of place that imagination alone could never quite match. It’s the difference between reading about a place and actually visiting (well, almost). Complementary video, voice-over and bonus features (including suitably mellow folk music) all conspire to enhance the Raleigh Island experience in exciting ways. Each interactive element works seamlessly without ever feeling forced or intrusive. Want to get a closer look at the ramshackle cottage that Coristine first encountered when he arrived on Raleigh? Maybe check out the fortuitous cove that proved just wide enough to accommodate the author’s trusty ultralight aircraft? Click and point at your leisure for an expanded look. The narrative is vibrant enough on its own, but riding alongside the author in his ultralight and seeing exactly what he does certainly adds compelling new dimensions to the telling.
An appealing memoir from a man who found his own little piece of heaven—and the perfect way to share it with others.Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: McLellan Interactive Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2012
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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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