Khan is little remembered outside analytical circles today. This likely won’t change that, but it provides insight into the...
A psychoanalytical star comes in for close analysis and is found deeply wanting.
Masud Khan (1924-89) came to London in something of the same way Ramu Gupta comes to New York in the 2002 film The Guru, with only a partially formed idea of what he might do but more than enough charisma to squeak by. He was tall—which, as with all things psychoanalytical, would have implications—and handsome, though with a visible deformity and all its implications. He was also very wealthy, and able to use his money and influence to attain what he wished. As psychoanalyst Hopkins writes in this lucid biography, Khan was a brilliant, impassioned student of literature; late in life, he would insist that a friend acquire a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and read it carefully and at once, just because he wanted to talk about it. He brought his literary skills to bear as an editor of psychoanalytic literature, including works by Sigmund Freud and, particularly, of the now highly regarded English analyst D. W. Winnicott (“It was part of the collusion between these two men,” writes Hopkins, using a most loaded word, “that Winnicott got most of the credit, even when Khan provided major help”). Khan was also much in demand as a therapist, though as the years wore on he was increasingly given to destructive relationships with women outside his marriage, including at least one patient, for which he was professionally reprimanded. Khan also became an alcoholic, and, though he battled cancer for years, in the end it was drinking that killed him. Hopkins concludes that Khan was “a brilliant interpreter of the self in his patients, but when it came to understanding himself, he was inconsistent.” As are all of us, which makes Khan’s fall from stardom comprehensible, if perhaps overdue.
Khan is little remembered outside analytical circles today. This likely won’t change that, but it provides insight into the works and days of a talented but tormented man.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-069-0
Page Count: 568
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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