What purports to be an unflinchingly, devastatingly honest look at the author’s marriage—and the institution of American marriage in general—instead reveals its layers of deceit, even self-deception.
There must be some domestic discord in the air. Thematically, this memoir by writing professor and literary essayist Ponteri shares much with the recent Judd Apatow film, This is 40, in which the director cast his wife and daughters in a marital comedy drawn from their real life, a movie that even those who found it often funny considered dark and edgy, often uncomfortable. “The phrase married man suggests a man who cannot love other women, a man doomed to loneliness,” writes the author, who confesses “the best sex I’ve ever had is in my head.” And his head is where this memoir necessarily unfolds, as he combines every woman he desires in the way he no longer does his wife into the singular Frannie, “a composite. Frannie is every girl my wife is not. Frannie is the other woman I draw into my fantasy world, every woman to which I masturbate, every woman I ogle.” Frannie is also the focus of a manuscript to which the author devoted “90 minutes a day, five days a week, all this time spent exploring our marriage separate from my wife,” a manuscript found by his wife. She understandably felt betrayed, yet did the author really betray her with a woman who didn’t exist? Even as it explores the layers of truth that are possible within a memoir and the inventions and distortions of memory on which it depends, the writing suffers when it moves from the author’s marriage to marriage itself, the “tight, toxic silence around marriage” that results in “not only our personal failures at marriage but our culture’s collective failure at marriage, the failure of an institution.”
As this personal essay veers toward polemic, its humorless author seems a little too proud of his bravery at voicing the unspeakable, shattering the taboo.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0983850489
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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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