A young woman’s account of how a dysfunctional family situation caused her to become separated from her six siblings but how all seven still managed to reconnect.
New Jersey native King was the second-oldest child of working-class parents “whose passions burned like an incinerator and swung wildly from love to hate and back again.” By the time her fourth sibling was born, her father began actively disappearing. Strapped for cash, the author’s mother put her third child, Becky Jo, in the care of her parents in Oklahoma. From that moment on, life in the King household followed a predictable pattern: the father would return temporarily, then leave his wife pregnant with another child who would get adopted as soon as it was born. When King’s parents finally divorced, they decided to send both King and her elder brother to join Becky Jo in Oklahoma. A Yankee girl in a place where it seemed the natives thought “the Civil War [was] still going on,” King gradually—though uneasily—settled into the life thrust upon her. She eventually accepted a name change and became the family golden child. Yet she never forgot the brother whom her grandfather, in a fit of rage, sent back to New Jersey for misbehavior, nor could she forget about the siblings she had never met. King returned to New York for college, preparing for the day she would meet the siblings she knew would come looking for her. She desired to be “a person worth finding, worth keeping.” As King made peace with her parents, each of the children, all girls, who had been adopted found her. Working together, the author and her siblings then began the difficult task of reclaiming the familial ties that had been denied them. King not only explores the impact of disrupted relationships; she also eloquently probes the meaning of both love and human connectedness.
A poignant memoir that thoughtfully examines a set of difficult and unique family relationships.Pub Date: June 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-08861-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
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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 19, 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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