Difficult reading at times, but the sometimes-scattershot nature of the book fits the chaotic nature of the author’s grief.
A memoir about writing through a devastating loss.
Years of work on a book, especially your first, make the day of publication a special occasion. You can’t put such effort into a project without feeling a deep satisfaction when it comes to fruition; some writers compare it to welcoming a new child. Starr’s (God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, 2012, etc.) first book, a translation of Dark Night of the Soul, came into the world in 2002 on the same day a police officer showed up to tell her that her daughter had died the night before in a car accident. The author understands that her spiritual journey can be best understood by setting the stage, introducing the players, and exploring the stories of the people she would turn to and rely on through the grief to come. As such, she writes about her convoluted upbringing. “The prevailing language of our extended family was sarcasm,” she writes, “and everyone seemed to have concluded that I was linguistically impaired. When my feelings were hurt (every few minutes, it seemed), that was because I had no sense of humor.” Surrounded by her family’s substance abuse and open relationships, Starr turned to Eastern spirituality early on. She worked as an assistant for famed spiritual teacher Ram Dass, but another spiritual guide took advantage of her adolescent innocence and tricked her into a sexual relationship, followed by a predictably degrading marriage. Starr takes a curious, almost journalistic approach to relating these events of her early years. There’s no sense of judgment of anybody who contributed to her tumultuous transition into adulthood. Also curious is the seeming disconnectedness of the first half of the book from the second half, but she brings them together toward the end, linking her spiritual travails to harrowing writing about her grief over her daughter.
Difficult reading at times, but the sometimes-scattershot nature of the book fits the chaotic nature of the author’s grief.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62203-413-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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