Insightful pieces with a cumulative impact that wouldn’t work as well standing alone.

THE BALTIMORE BOOK OF THE DEAD

A sequel to The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (2008), the author’s previous collection of sharp-eyed memorials.

Though Winik (MFA Program/Univ. of Baltimore; Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living, 2013, etc.) is most widely regarded as a humorist, through her columns and NPR commentary, death has been a focus of her book projects since First Comes Love (1996). As she observes in the introduction to her latest, “death is the subtext of life, there is no way around it. It is the foundation of life’s meaning and value.” The author also explains that her volumes reflect chronology rather than geography; despite the title, these aren’t Baltimore’s deaths but rather deaths that have occurred since she moved to Baltimore from Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, in 2009. So there’s plenty about her New Jersey girlhood, beginning with the opening piece on her mother and proceeding through the deaths of family members and her mother’s friends. Then she moves on to her pivotal years in Texas, where she found her voice and professional identity in Austin. Winik also commemorates people she didn’t know personally but whose deaths affected her and the culture deeply, including David Bowie and Lou Reed. In writing about these dozens of deaths, the author is writing about life in general, how quickly it can change and how long a memory can persist, and her life in particular, “how big ideas about art and revolution were so easily infected with the stupid romance of self-destruction.” Some die without warning, as Winik writes of an unnamed friend (almost all of those who inspired these pieces go unnamed), “he was fifty-six, just like my own father who died the same way: the heart in the dark of the night that loses its way.” The famous and the anonymous, the scandalous and the respectable: All get their due. For all of the variety in details and circumstance, all of the stories proceed to the same ending.

Insightful pieces with a cumulative impact that wouldn’t work as well standing alone.

Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-64009-121-4

Page Count: 152

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: July 31, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018

Did you like this book?

No Comments Yet

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

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

Did you like this book?

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Did you like this book?

more