As an artist and a person, what Parms desires most of all is “to soak everything in,” and as she does so, we find her to be...
A debut author exhibits a mind brimming with ideas and fired by self-inquiry, drawn equally to the wondrous and tragic, with thoughts framed in sections named after the sculptures of Degas, Bernini, and Rodin.
Early on, Parms' (Writing/Vermont Coll. of Fine Art) ruminations can feel overly airy, more tenuously connected ramblings than essays. One wishes she would be less inclined toward free-form exposition, her words filling the space “like careless teenagers,” and simply stick to the point. But perhaps this is mistaking a fugitive continuity for lack of cohesion or wanting to impose order on a writer who canters like an intellectual mustang. For all its deceptively fractured moments, the collection possesses a kaleidoscopic unity, one that gradually grows more appealing and provocative. The child of a biracial, bohemian couple who divorced in her youth, Parms soon learned of the transience and frailty of ideals. Possessed of an “archival instinct to reconstruct and conserve the mundane pieces of a moment,” the author’s approach also captures, often in a euphoria of expression, startlingly poetic insights. Parms is invigorated by eccentricity, her own and that of others', though this can lead to narrative dissipation at times. Yet at its best, the book exhumes treasures secreted in her “almanac of riddle and wonder,” surmounting the limits of language to convey human experience. The author offers beautiful reflections on memory, art, identity, and living within the interstices of the world, and she provides many gems of observation and expertly crafted metaphors and similes. Along the way, Parms also injects the book with an array of arresting historical, cultural, and aesthetic asides.
As an artist and a person, what Parms desires most of all is “to soak everything in,” and as she does so, we find her to be a perceptive, unsettling, and surprisingly endearing guide.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0820350158
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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