A well-told memoir that strikes a taut balance between adventure and spiritual meditation.
A man pulls himself out of a life of crime and drug addiction after a conversion to Christianity in this debut memoir.
In this action-packed autobiography, Haley fights, drinks and spends most of his youth getting into trouble. After spending his childhood witnessing abuse and alcoholism in his family, he learned to be a tough kid, and he spent most of his time with other tough kids. The thing that set him apart was his commitment to fighting for underdogs; he had no problem joining a brawl, but he always backed the weaker fighters. In most of Haley’s stories, though, readers can see that the author was the underdog in his own life; each time he fights his way out of addiction, for example, something happens to pull him back under. He’s drawn to religion early—his stepmother held family séances, and he describes an encounter with a ghost that triggered his exploration of spirituality—but it isn’t until his best friend dies of an overdose that he fully dedicates himself to a clean lifestyle and turns his back on drugs and violence. Before that moment, readers follow Haley to a deep-sea diving school, where students spend their nights playing games of quarters, drinking fifths of rum, and driving aimlessly and recklessly through the night; in Louisiana, he cements his dangerous reputation by fighting a professional kickboxer; and in a small town in Mexico, he comes face to face with real poverty while searching for Xanax. Haley alternates between the memoir and “Rest Stops” where he meditates on passages from the Bible and relates them to the events of his life. His conversational writing style works well in two ways: The wild tales of his life make the reader feel like an old friend, swapping stories in a bar; the overtly religious sections, however, have a confessional feel, and that bar the reader was sitting in transforms into a church basement. It’s a sophisticated way to handle the story and lends depth to both threads.
A well-told memoir that strikes a taut balance between adventure and spiritual meditation.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1449710477
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 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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