An account of the author’s obsession with a female Rhodes scholar who killed herself at 27.
In 1981, Teich (co-author: Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise Your Child in a Complex World, 2001) was a senior at Yale. She was also among a tiny minority of women vying for a Rhodes scholarship, which had only just begun to be open to female applicants. Uncertain as she felt about herself as “a writer, a loner, a dancer, a Jew,” the author was nevertheless among those selected to attend Oxford for two years of postgraduate work. The scholarship afforded her many elite academic—and later, career—opportunities. Yet Teich never felt entirely comfortable with the idea that she would forever be identified with a born-for-success group of individuals educated to “fight the world’s fight.” Privately, she saw herself as a “toxic” woman with a perverse need for mistreatment from men and a tainted past that included a sexually abusive relationship with a dance teacher. Now a happily married woman with two children, Teich suddenly developed a morbid fixation with her daughter's personal safety. She also came across an obituary for another former Rhodes scholar who had died under tragic circumstances. Lacey Cooper-Reynolds was a golden girl hailed as “brilliant…radiant [and] beguiling,” but she committed suicide just as her life and career had begun to bloom. Fascinated by the young woman's story, Teich researched her background and history relentlessly. Like the author, Cooper-Reynolds was also an outsider, but one whose difference came of a modest background worlds apart from the high-society glamour of Oxford. As Teich pondered the pressures her Rhodes “sister” had faced, she had to confront her own painful past as well as the fears that now threatened to destroy the family she had struggled to create. Teich’s book is not just compelling for the way it plumbs the psyche of an outwardly driven and ambitious woman; it is also provocative in its questioning of what female success really means.
An honest, compassionate memoir about shaking off personal demons and finding “solace…liberation [and] joy.”Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58005-569-7
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PSYCHOLOGY
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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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