A troubling account of the search for roots in the racially and psychologically complex American South. Hunt, a novelist (Free, 1992, Joy, 1991) and actress (Hair), and, it must be noted in obeisance to the rules of American celebrity worship, the mother of Mick Jagger's first child, is an intelligent, responsible writer. She discovers that her family's deepest secret is an ``insane,'' long-institutionalized woman, Hunt's grandmother, still alive in a nursing home in Memphis. Hunt flies from her home in France to meet Ernestine, a tiny woman over 90, usually silent, withdrawn, perhaps unreachable. Ernestine is living in a small private nursing home in substandard conditions, her upkeep paid for by her dead husband's mistress. A host of disturbing questions about Ernestine's history, and Hunt's family, unfold. Was Ernestine, who has been institutionalized since the 1920s, ever really insane? Or did she just suffer from a combination of postpartum depression and her husband's wish to get her out of the way? Hunt stresses the role of color in this story. Ernestine was a blond, blue-eyed black woman born to a dark mother who was ambivalent about her daughter's appearance. Hunt's research takes her all the way back to the antebellum South and up to the life and tragic death of her father, Ernestine's son, a Harvard- educated psychiatrist. While much of what Hunt uncovers could only be seen as a tragedy, the conclusion does offer a faint note of triumph: Ernestine gains a family of sorts. And Hunt, who recovers and brings to light so much family history, is someone we are glad to come to know, a kind of Everywoman. Repossessing Ernestine reads at times like a cross between a confessional article in a woman's magazine and a detective novel. It's not literature, but it is honest, energetic, and profoundly evocative of the deep, deep psychological imprint of the question of color in the South. (b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017443-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
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