Expressive, intimate snapshots of one woman’s life set atop the backdrop of global history.
Historical events and personal family stories entwined in essays.
In these narratives of 25 moments in her life, essayist Schwartz (Emerita, Writing/Richard Stockton Coll.; Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village, 2008, etc.), the child of German-Jewish immigrants, begins with her father, who returned to the village in Germany that he fled after he realized that as Hitler continued to rise in power, Germany would quickly become a dangerous place for Jews. He managed to move most of his family out prior to the Holocaust, saving them from deportation to the concentration camps. Across other pieces, Schwartz ponders her childhood growing up in Queens, New York, her puppy, her mother’s handbag, and the wallpaper, bricks, and hidden rooms in her house, which dovetails with her consideration of the Underground Railroad and life as a slave. She writes about being a juror and deciding the fate of a prisoner and about two men, one Jewish, one Arab, who have been lifelong friends; she wonders why others can’t overcome these same “political chasms.” Some of the other tender, reflective pieces include a story about writing poems and stories with her granddaughter, living beyond the label of “cancer survivor,” and ruminating on her husband, her lifetime love. “It is through these private lives,” writes the author, “that we come to understand how the thunderstorm in one neighborhood can be a drizzle a few blocks away—and who sees a rainbow, who hears only the storm?....[This book] is my weather report from the mid-twentieth century until now. It’s not truth with a capital ‘T.’ ” Although the essays are highly personal, most readers will relate to the larger pictures of human rights, racism, the women’s movement, and a score of other topics.
Expressive, intimate snapshots of one woman’s life set atop the backdrop of global history.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0630-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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