A deeply affecting family memoir about the author’s brother, who, within a matter of months, changed from a kind of hippie lost soul in Jerusalem to a baal teshuva (literally, “master of repentance”)—a newly pious Jew. For many years Hammer, an international correspondent for Newsweek, had been horrified by the increasing fervor of his brother, Tuvia (originally Tony). He was astonished and dismayed by Tuvia’s “humorless certainty,— as well as his hermetic existence in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, New York, where Tuvia and his wife, Ahuva (another —BT—), had settled to raise a large family in near-poverty, surrounded by like-minded Jews whose ignorance of and disdain for modern culture was sometimes accompanied by ethnic chauvinism and racism. Hammer also watched his brother evolve into a “stern unbending moralist” when it came to even the faintest allusion to sex or having fun. Almost all the family income was provided by Ahuva, as Tuvia spent most of his time praying and studying Talmud. Now, Hammer struggles to understand his brother’s leap into absolute faith and an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle against the background of their parents— divorce, their father’s professional crises, and the deaths, all within a year, of their half-sister and two of Tuvia’s closest friends. During eight visits to Monsey, he talks at length to Tuvia and immerses himself deeply in Tuvia’s communal life and rituals even as he persists in his own atheism. He thus slowly comes to appreciate the striving for holiness and family that attracted Tuvia and now provide the guidelines for his life. Near the end of the book, he acknowledges that “my own impressions of him had evolved through shades of anger, frustration, empathy, and acceptance.— Hammer’s achievement in this first book is to render a deft, well-written of his brother’s ultrapietistic life with a fine balance of journalistic objectivity and the nuanced understanding of a man whose struggle to know his brother has made him something of an “insider.”
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1999
ISBN: 0-7868-6428-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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