Refined, concise, often emotionally wringing memoir vignettes.
These pieces get at the source of fiction-writer Gerber's work (Chattering Man, 1991, etc.), the kernels and essences and truths that have shaped the imaginings that made her fictions “forms of emotion recollected in an even higher state of emotion.” She knows how to turn a story on a dime, as when Wallace Stegner tells her, “You hold out for what you're worth,” as well as to create a more pervasive atmosphere, as in the stifling pecking order at Yaddo, how she experienced the diminishment of every small disappointment and insult. She can twist the knife of a family who lost three sons during WWII, and she can seesaw between the black humor of “My Mother's Suffering: you could say it was the theme song of my life” to the lacerating words they share when they decide to withdraw her life support: “ ‘But are you sure you're ready to die? Are you ready to say goodbye to us?’ ‘Yes!’ It took all her energy to say the word.” She can, above all, be unsparing, visiting an aged aunt and other old crones in a retirement home, where she “smelled their smell as we all crowded into the small elevator to go down for the watered soup and canned peas for lunch.” Readers can also witness the transmutation of experience into fiction (Gerber includes three stories), feel the blur, as when she relates the suicide of her sister's husband in a piece of pure memoir and then read it again in a story she wrote of the incident, full of friction, dislocation, and the author finding her own measure of veracity.
“I wait to receive further news from existence and to give it true justice in the retelling.” She will, too, cutting the facets just right.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-299-18350-5
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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 20, 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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