Seventeen autobiographical essays of varying quality that address the authors' experiences ``outside''—as editor Aguero (Humanities/Pine Manor College) puts it—the ``dominant tradition'' of ``white, male, heterosexual, upper-class, Eurocentric'' culture. A number of the contributors fall prey to banality by perpetrating stereotypes they eagerly purport to examine or overturn. Toi Derricotte, a black poet, insists that her light skin ``keeps things, literally, from being either black or white,'' but quickly retreats into a stance of victimhood when she recounts the racial insensitivities of fellow writers at a writers' colony. Far from exploring a unique or multilayered cultural heritage, the mainstream language of self-assertion and self-absorption too often employed here translates into a claim for literary attention: Several authors quote from their own work and relate the progress of their careers. The most successful pieces often approach the question of cultural authority obliquely or not at all. Gary Soto's stark evocation of working at a tire factory with illegal Mexican immigrants is spare, unsentimental, and authentic. Jack AgÅeros's cosmopolitan paean to different breads he has encountered while growing up in N.Y.C. includes a description of one bakery whose ethnic provenance he can't recall. Though the ethnic grandparent unfamiliar with American customs and wisdom is a fixture in several essays, Suzanne Odette Khuri in ``Jiddo: A Portrait'' evokes a much more complex view of the Lebanese grandfather she barely remembers by dovetailing his last years with the descent of Beirut into chaos. There are other accomplished essays here by Norman Paul Hyett, Kiana Davenport, Judith Oritz Cofer, and Garrett Hongo. A mixed bag, assembled under the 'common theme' of the 'relationship between culture and the problem of identity.'
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8203-1498-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION
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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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