Safran recounts growing up on the fringes of society, raised by a mother who dropped out of college in the early 1960s to become a hippie.
The author is now a successful lawyer whose defense of a battered woman wrongly incarcerated for 20 years is the subject of the 2011 documentary Crime After Crime. Safran describes his mother's embrace of the counterculture with wry humor and a vivid eye for detail. When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, she was pregnant and unmarried. Determined to raise her child and hoping for assistance, she joined a radical lesbian commune in San Francisco. When the child turned out to be a boy, they rejected him, and she turned instead to a collective “of gay male babysitters who would watch the children of activist feminist mothers so they could take part in political protests.” While receiving regular welfare checks, Safran’s mother unsuccessfully pursued an artistic career, all while indoctrinating her son on the evils of capitalist imperialism and nuclear war. Abandoning art, she tried subsistence agriculture in Northern California. There, the author had to contend with living in sheds and shacks without indoor plumbing, frequent hunger and often being left to fend for himself. When he was 9, his mother began a four-year relationship with an alcoholic who pretended to be an exiled revolutionary. Although her lover had violent rages and was brutally abusive to both of them, she married him. Despite being intimidated by bullying from his stepfather and fellow students, Safran finally mustered the courage to confront them. With help from teachers and encouragement from a longtime family friend, he excelled in school and eventually came to reject his mother's ideological preconceptions.
A remarkable account of survival despite the odds.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2460-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
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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 19, 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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