Sequel to the author’s bestselling memoir Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found (2000).
The child of young parents compelled to give an infant daughter up to adoption in the early 1960s, Lauck begins by returning to material from her earlier memoir: her treatment at the hands of careless adoptive parents, years of being shuttled from one reluctant relation to another, the complex relationship with a half brother and horrifying experiences of sexual and emotional abuse. Here she focuses on how the knowledge of being adopted informed those early experiences and shaped the course of her failed first marriage. While the author had searched for her birth parents, and her mother especially, before the birth of her own children, the arrival of her son set in motion a larger spiritual journey to discover her identity as a woman, mother, wife and human. She studied Buddhism and struggled to save her marriage, eventually recognizing that her need to know herself contributed to the failure of a relationship with a good man. She navigated the arcane system of state adoption law and finally, with the help of a private detective, located her birth mother in Reno, Nev. The most interesting parts of the narrative describe that complex and belated parent-child relationship, which may not have resulted in any particular intimacy but did heal some of Lauck's most important psychic wounds. However, the narrative is overly cool and analytical, and the author averts her gaze from some of the most difficult and raw parts of such a history—perhaps in deference to the privacy and feelings of her natural birth family, who never emerge as fully developed characters. The result is a story that never quite compels, despite the thoughtful writing and occasionally powerful moments of emotional honesty.
A memoir of a woman's journey to find her birth parents that provides some interesting reflections on the institution and emotional experience of adoption but keeps the reader at arm's length.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58005-367-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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 19, 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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