Eclectic, long-winded and occasionally diverting portraits by New Yorker staff writer Singer (Somewhere in America, 2004, etc.).
The quirkier the subject the better in this reporter’s book, although Singer is clearly not interested in his subjects per se but rather in what he unearths about them that will give him insider cachet. In the case of his tediously detailed study of the family-run vegetable farm in Del Mar, Calif., that supplies Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant, Singer’s well-connected attentions win him an invitation from the owners to attend their matriarch’s funeral back in Japan. “Secrets of the Magus,” a rather cloying profile of famous sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay, merits reading for his in-the-know look at the craft and its historic practitioners. “Trump Solo,” written in 1997, ensures that the real-estate mogul comes off as a self-absorbed blowhard by nailing his “gaseous blather.” Singer likes Martin Scorsese a lot better, recording in “The Man Who Forgets Nothing” how “convincingly” the director repudiates his most graphically bloody depictions by declaring, “I’m not interested in violence that way anymore.” The most worthwhile pieces here are the portraits of less famous people involved in compelling pursuits, such as Richard Seiverling, organizer of the Tom Mix Festival, and international book collector Michael Zinman. “Mom Overboard!” offers 1996 cameos that now seem largely clichéd of overtaxed professional women on the mommy track. Occasionally, Singer’s recondite searches take him where few readers care to tread, as in “La Cabeza de Villa,” which recounts the Skull and Bones Society’s claim to have Pancho Villa’s skull in its Yale home. “Joe Mitchell’s Secret” delightfully treats a subject closer to home: deceased fellow New Yorker reporter Mitchell, author of Joe Gould’s Secret, whose “urban peregrinations . . . delineated a romantic quest, the trajectory of a polite but persistent intimate affection.”
Peregrinations of a curious, harmless sort that time has rendered largely irrelevant.Pub Date: July 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-19725-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 19, 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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