London Review of Books contributing editor Harding (The Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man’s Gate, 2000, etc.) seeks his birth mother after 50 years.
As a child, the author lived along the waters of the Thames with the family that took him when he was less than two weeks old. At the age of five, Harding was informed that he was adopted and that his natural parents were a young Irish maiden and a Scandinavian sailor, not his capricious, tippling mother and his cocky, bridge-card hustler father. As an adult, he searched for his parents, scouring birth records, voting registrations and death reports and interviewing old neighbors with faulty memories. Harding compiled a dossier, a burgeoning portfolio of known and implied facts about the Hibernian girl who bore him half a century earlier. The author knew a few hard facts: She arrived in England after the war, lived at 43 Mackenzie Close and worked at a chain store. But who was she? What was she like? Was there a physical resemblance? Did he have brothers or sisters? Plotted craftily, his journal of discovery unfolds memorably, and his detective work, sometimes desultory, often assiduous, was finally productive. Along the way, Harding also uncovered the saga of his adoptive mother’s rise to a better class of society. As a proper memoirist must do, he invests the narrative of his familiar parents with unique character in his story of natural and acquired parentage. A fitting denouement, as well as a new introduction for American readers, is provided. “I’ve tried to tell a story: this is not a campaigning book,” he writes. “Nevertheless, it’s a powerful illustration of what can happen when an adopted person, whose birth certificate shows only the names of the adoptive parents, exercises a legal right to see the original birth certificate.”Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-84467-657-6
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL 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 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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