The art critic for the Observer explores family secrets stretching back 90 years.
In the fall of 1929, writes Cumming (The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, 2016), a 3-year-old girl “was playing by herself with a new tin spade” on a Lincolnshire beach, her mother at her side—until, for a moment, the girl dropped out of her sight and was coaxed away by someone watching nearby, “so fast that she couldn’t have got anywhere near the water.” The girl, who would become the author’s mother, the artist Betty Elston, did not drown; she turned up a few days later. Cumming probes her memory and investigates family albums in an attempt to determine what happened. What she turns up is a secret betrayal on the part of her grandfather to which her grandmother must have surrendered, thinking it “her Christian duty” but likely having had no choice but to do so. The facts of the story and their resolution command attention, but in the end, they’re less interesting than the author’s process of thinking about them. As she looks at photo albums with the eye of a scholarly detective, she discerns patterns of gaps and absences, sees eyes averted, a countenance “reluctant or evasive,” and reads between the lines. Those photographs from the past connect generations in a one-way conversation even as present-day readers, saturated in color, look at monochrome photographs as if the world of their subjects were colorless too: “The mind knows this is false,” writes Cumming, “but the optic nerve is fooled into finding these figures less real, immediate, vital. Monochrome turns the present into the past; makes the past look even more distant.” Her nuanced, pensive account restores reality and vitality to figures from out of the past, making them meaningful while uncovering their secrets.
A satisfying mystery that could have been grist for Agatha Christie’s mill.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9871-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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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