Posthumous love letter to the author’s mother.
Prolific Dutch-born novelist de Hartog (The Outer Buoy: A Story of the Ultimate Voyage, 1994, etc.), who died in 2002, tells the story of a quiet, self-effacingly heroic woman in prose to match. (He never even tells us his mother’s name.) She was in her early 20s when she met and married Arnold de Hartog, a Protestant pastor and theologian two decades her senior who is still remembered for his anti-Nazi agitation and a speech he made in support of the Jews just before the outbreak of World War II. When he died in 1938, two years before the Nazi invasion of Holland, the family was thrown into chaos. Jan’s mother was visiting his older brother in the Dutch East Indies, which was soon captured by the Japanese. It was in an internment camp that the woman who had always seemed to exist to support her fiery husband finally came into her own, displaying a steely strength her sons had never suspected. While imprisoned, she not only provided spiritual succor to her fellow detainees, occasionally in the form of eerily prescient palm readings that earned her the nickname “mischievous saint,” but also brokered a cease-fire between the Dutch army and Indonesian guerrilla fighters who allowed a convoy of sick female prisoners to be carried through the jungle to a Red Cross station. De Hartog heard these stories from others; he only truly began to know his mother for himself 20 years later, when she was diagnosed with stomach cancer. As he despaired, her modest bravery and steadfast faith again sustained him. The book is remarkable not just for its exceptional subject, but also for its portrait of the unsettling process by which an adult child comes at last to know a parent.
A diminutive masterpiece.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42470-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 2023 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.
