An illuminating portrait of a childhood of excitement, adventure, and love positioned against the backdrop of 1970s-era...
Reflections on a childhood spent with a feminist, revolution-minded mother.
When Andreas' (International Studies/Brown Univ.; Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, 2013, etc.) mother died, he found hundreds of her journals, written over more than three decades, including when he traveled with her as a young boy throughout South America. Born in Kansas and raised as a Mennonite, Carol Andreas was not a typical 1950s housewife content to play mother to her three sons. She quickly discovered the political activism and feminism movements of the mid-1960s and wanted to be a part of the revolution, wherever it might take place. After leaving his father and living in a commune for a couple of years, mother and son moved to South America, traveling the countryside and living in squalor to be one with the local people. Throughout the book, Andreas impressively re-creates the settings and conversations that took place in Chile and Peru in the early 1970s. The author fully immerses readers in his experiences, which included a lack of discipline or structure to daily life, poverty, and filth (he notes numerous bouts with lice and invasions of mice), and he captures the love felt between mother and son as they worked alongside the poor. Andreas doesn't hide his mother's obsessive nature, shy away from mentioning details of listening to her numerous lovers while he pretended to sleep mere feet from the bed, or dismiss the angst he felt when he thought about his American father, whom he missed very deeply at times. The author also includes details of his infrequent interactions with his older brothers, who were on their own different paths. The overall picture is one of adventure, self-reliance, and intimacy during times of great change, and Andreas offers an informative perspective on what it was like to be a kid through it all.
An illuminating portrait of a childhood of excitement, adventure, and love positioned against the backdrop of 1970s-era South America.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2439-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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