With the cooperation of his subject’s daughter, Sunday Times chief book reviewer Carey (What Good Are the Arts?, 2006, etc.) produces the first major biography of Nobel Prize–winning novelist William Golding (1911–1993).
The author is uniquely equipped to handle the task. He was the first person allowed access to Golding’s immense archive of letters, journals and drafts, and he also knew Golding personally, having edited a Festschrift for his 75th birthday. The amount of detail is impressive, even staggering. After an unhappy career at Oxford and a stint in the Royal Navy during World War II, Golding became, like his father, a dissatisfied schoolteacher. He published several novels, including Lord of the Flies (his first book) in 1954, while laboring over class preparations and student essays. Literary celebrity finally freed him from his bondage in the classroom. Carey ably chronicles Golding’s career-long relationship with Faber and Faber and editor Charles Monteith, and he describes Golding’s long marriage, which was lubricated with alcohol, animated by world travel and punctuated by arguments, even violence. The author portrays an insecure Golding who revised ferociously but disdained research, often preferring the visions in his imagination to the inconvenience of fact. Although he professed to dislike publicity and fame, Golding reveled in it as well, accepting countless speaking engagements and tours all over the world, as well as numerous awards and honorary degrees. Despite Carey’s enormous scholarship and access, however, much of this massive volume slips into hagiography. He invariably portrays Golding in the most positive way possible, dragging even the novelist’s darkest demons—excessive drink, possible spousal abuse—into a forgiving if not flattering light.
A tendentious but relentlessly thorough, historically important treatment.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8732-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | WORLD | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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 20, 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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