Comprehensive life of the late novelist Robert Stone (1937-2015), victim and chronicler of an excessive era.
“Nothing is free.” So, writes novelist Bell (Behind the Moon, 2017, etc.), ran a mantra of Stone’s. It’s fitting. Stone grew up fatherless, with a mother who may have been schizophrenic, in and out of orphanages and shelters, and he responded with a need to fight for every achievement. So he did, joining a gang, showing up drunk to high school—and somehow arriving in Wallace Stegner’s famed writing workshop at Stanford. There, Stone fell in with the likes of Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and spent much of the 1960s zonked out, lending irony to the subtitle of his memoir Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. But as Bell clearly shows, Stone was still capable of marvels: His Vietnam War novel Dog Soldiers, published in 1974, was “regarded as the definitive work of fiction on the war by readers who found it both curious and curiously appropriate that only a small percentage of its action took place in Vietnam, and practically none of it in combat.” Other hallmark novels were Children of Light and A Flag for Sunrise, a Pulitzer finalist. Stone arrived at a state of solvency and relative fame in midcareer, hampered only by his prodigious appetites: The end of the 1990s found him suffering from many illnesses, some self-wrought, as his “drug and alcohol problems were still hovering at crisis level.” Bell’s approach seems formulaic after a time: He writes of a period of time, offers a sometimes-too-detailed summary of the plot of a given book or story, surveys the criticism (Michiko Kakutani being a special bête noire), and finally looks at the till. It’s a lot of inside baseball. Though perhaps too much for civilian readers, the business end in particular will fascinate working writers. For all Stone’s flaws, Bell makes a solid case for the importance of his work.
Perhaps not the last word on Stone but essential for students and fans of the writer’s works.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54160-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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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 20, 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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