Former president Jimmy Carter’s grandson makes a well-meaning entry in a long-dormant genre, the Peace Corps memoir.
Thirteen-year-old Jason Carter accompanied his grandfather on a humanitarian mission to Africa in 1988 and returned with vivid, contradictory images: one of idyllic landscapes, another of children his own age pressed into military service. One of them asked whether he knew Michael Jordan: “I was shocked,” Carter writes. “Perhaps, I thought, the gap between Africa and America is not so huge as I guessed.” Fast-forward a decade, and Carter, now a young Peace Corps volunteer assigned to the northern townships of South Africa, discovers that gap to be huge indeed, at least for blacks, even under Nelson Mandela’s government. On the scene during a time of transition when that government was diligently seeking to remake itself to serve the hitherto disenfranchised majority, Carter offers a firsthand look at life in the townships, ranging from notes on matters of daily existence to larger commentaries on matters of freedom and justice. His narrative is in the main informative, though peppered with gee-whiz enthusiasms (“Hitchhiking is one of the most liberating experiences I can imagine”) and liberal posturing (“Now that we were able to point fingers at other oppressors, we were ready to hold high the banner of justice”). Carter is at his best when he lets others do the talking, as the time a weary government minister tells him that the most surprising thing he learned about taking power was that “we just had no idea how much we had to do,” or when a passer-by in a local shop comments on his globalizing mission: “Yours is the best way to colonize a people. Americans at least give you something in return.”
A book particularly suited for those contemplating a hitch in the Peace Corps themselves.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7922-8012-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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
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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
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