An award-winning actress’s collection of never-sent literary missives to the men who have most influenced her personal development.
In this accomplished debut, Parker, who has won Tony, Emmy, and Golden Globe awards, traces her life story through a series of essays that she addresses to the “manly creature[s]” who have made her into the woman she is. Her first letters are to male members of her immediate family, including her grandfather and father. Both anchored her to a family heritage, and both are individuals in whom she catches glimpses of herself and her children. From there, Parker radiates outward to others, such as the “Yacqui Indian Boy” and the “Risk Taker” singing star, who gave her glimpses of worlds that existed beyond the small town she knew growing up. Like the Indian Boy and the Risk Taker, her addressees are often men who educated her in ways she never expected. A college “movement teacher” who gave Parker a negative evaluation of her work and self-presentation not only taught her the wisdom of “[l]etting someone you don’t really like surprise you,” but also an important lesson in humility. Some, like the three men she collectively refers to as Cerberus, taught her to value herself through the hard lessons in mistreatment they gave her. Others, like the nameless New York City cab driver upon whom she heaped unmerited blame and abuse, become the objects of apology and of musings on who she was at particular moments in time. Still others, like “Gorgeous” and “Oyster Picker,” are creations of the author’s fertile imagination and express, on the one hand, her longings for the perfect man and reconnection with her beloved dead father on the other. Parker's missives move effortlessly among nostalgia, intensity, and playfulness, but in the end, they all work together to reveal both the small and large ways in which we impact each other.
A unique, poised, and polished first book from a respected actress.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0783-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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PERSPECTIVES
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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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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