Dick Tracy meets Jean-Paul Sartre in this deeply philosophical, deftly written account of the author’s 33 days confined in a cellar. Reemtsma (More Than a Champion: The Style of Muhammad Ali, 1998) is one of Germany’s leading intellectuals. On March 25, 1996, while walking to his office, he was assaulted, kidnapped, and later chained up in a cellar, where he’d spend the next 33 days awaiting a ransom hand-over. Reemtsma describes his horrific experience in a narrative that blends searing emotional honesty with an almost eerie intellectual detachment. Admitting his terror and utter powerlessness, Reemtsma subjects himself to meticulous self-examination. Seemingly trivial events, such as when the kidnappers take away his wristwatch, trigger philosophical musings: with a watch “you can focus your inner resources and conquer one hour after the other. Without a watch you are in a sea of time, out of sight of land.” The author’s intellect moves comfortably from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Sylvester Stallone, from American pop music to Renaissance art. Among other things, he uses his time in the cellar to examine the Cartesian concept of the individual and rejects it. He also considers the concepts of God, fate, and death. In a real sense, Reemtsma shared his dark cellar with the entire Western intellectual tradition. Yet the book contains considerable human drama, as the kidnappers try to elude the police and the author battles boredom and despair. When the initial efforts to hand over the ransom fail, the kidnappers threaten to murder Reemtsma. Finally, the ransom is paid, and the kidnappers drive him deep into the forest: “Car stops. Trunk opens. The thought again: Are they going to shoot me now?” He’s released, only to be swarmed by a ravenous press wanting to report his “feelings.” Reemtsma has written this complex book in part to confront those feelings. A relentlessly candid examination of one man’s heart and mind.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40098-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
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