The love that binds a family—and the hidden fissures that fracture it—are revealed in this haunting memoir.
In some ways Alexander’s Irish Catholic family is a picture of strength and longevity; her parents never divorced and raised three daughters and a son without glaring dysfunctions. But there were sharp heartaches during her childhood in Corpus Christi, Texas, including a stillbirth. And there were more muted conflicts, the author writes, between “[m]y mother, ill-equipped to speak her mind, [and] my father, ill-equipped to read it”; between the author and her siblings; and between the family as a whole and her domineering father, whose return from work each day was “unceremonious, unnoticed and as far as he was concerned, unwelcome.” Alexander (Choices 86,400 a Day, 2011) traces these tensions back to her parents’ and grandparents’ hardscrabble childhoods and to their loss of loved ones and experience of disruption, and forward to the fraying ties between her parents and their adult children, especially the son who incurred her father’s anger for marrying outside the church. Eventually, in her parents’ old age, as the author pushes their wheelchairs and tends to their frailties, wounds and estrangement partially heal amid a renewed sense of all they share. Alexander lays out this history obliquely in a series of fleeting, fragmentary, poetic vignettes, often no more than a solitary paragraph or stanza, that merge into a pointillist tapestry. Her prose is quiet, but it has a luminous immediacy—“One morning I saw my mother spellbound by sunlit patterns on the kitchen counter, the ladder slats of the window blinds tilted just right”—that brings the plainest domestic scene to life; her voice is restrained, yet she uses it to convey intense emotions. As much as this book is about disappointment, grief and regret, it’s also about the affection and longing that make those feelings so painful. An album of finely wrought, moving impressions of relationships and buried feelings.
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-463515195
Page Count: 236
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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