One family’s adventures volunteering in foreign countries.
Getting bitten by a spider monkey multiple times was not what Marshall was looking for when he and his wife decided to take their two teenage children on a six-month, around-the-world trip based on volunteerism. “Uninspired” in his work, with his eyes “constantly red from too much computer time,” the author was “listless, unmotivated, going through the motions of life—which was a fairly accurate description of my marriage at the time, too.” Although still in love, there was no spark or passion with his wife, Traca. They wanted more for themselves and for their children, who were locked into the computerized social media world like so many American children. So, they rented their house in Maine and set out, first landing at the Osa Wildlife Sanctuary in Costa Rica, where the spider monkeys were free to roam and the humans were often at their mercy. From there, the family flew to New Zealand and worked on a variety of farms, spending days pulling mountains of weeds to reclaim the native bush from invasive plants. Then they went to Thailand for a month, where they taught English in a small village school and Marshall’s two children “were treated more like visiting pop stars than untrained volunteers.” The next stops included an orphanage in India, a school in the Himalayas and a short visit in Portugal. Marshall’s use of rich details locates readers firmly in each time and place, enabling them to sense the adventure, wonder and joy he experienced in his surroundings and in watching his children grow into hardworking, more responsible teens, as well as the frustrations and disappointments he and his family inevitably encountered along the way.
A great armchair adventure that should inspire others to consider voluntourism as a way to help others and see the world.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0345549648
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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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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