Singer’s first book is a memoir of two obsessions: with California and with finding a place for herself.
The story begins with the dissolution of the author’s family and her move, at 16, with younger siblings, mother, and stepfather, from Montreal to California, a place with which she has been absorbed for years. “My affair with California begins many years before we meet,” writes the author, recalling an early library encounter with a book about the Golden State. “A state?” she wondered. “Like New York, where we drive once a year across the border to do our school shopping, hiding new clothes and shoes deep in our Jeep’s trunk on the way back, away from the customs officials so we don’t have to pay extra taxes?” Singer’s glee at being in California was complicated by a custody battle involving one of her brothers. “Are you sexually active?” That was the question the opposing counsel asked her just before she took the stand on her mother’s behalf. It was a treacherous moment, but while Singer draws her structure from it—the book is built, more or less, as a series of interrogations and responses—she is interested in treachery of a more personal sort. The author is at her best when she uses narrative to examine disconnection, as with the Taylors, a family for whom she worked yet never quite belonged. “Two of my own families,” she writes, “have already exploded. Nuclear family has not proved successful, but still I am drawn to it.” This search for place took Singer north, where she researched a serial killer in Yosemite, though she was really looking for herself. As the book progresses, it becomes less fragmentary. On one hand, that’s inevitable given the difficulty of stitching together a book of fragments. On the other, it’s disappointing given the strength of her fractured approach.
A mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does not cohere, how do we build a self from the shards?Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9988257-1-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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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