A frank, relentless, gripping memoir that illustrates both man’s inhumanity to man and how quiet resolution can reclaim and...
A survivor of the 2015 massacre in Paris recalls the brutality of the attack and narrates the seemingly endless series of his consequent surgeries and other treatments.
Lançon, who worked (and still works) as a cultural critic for Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly, was severely wounded during the attack—shot in the face and left for dead on an office floor that, as he relates, was soaked in blood. Throughout the narrative, the author remains surprisingly calm, describing in an intelligent and deeply informed voice the assault and its grim aftermath. His account is also full of memories of Charlie Hebdo before the assault, of the author’s family and other emotional relationships, and of quotidian habits that became more precious as he could no longer control his life. For months, Lançon was hospitalized, endured countless surgeries to repair his face—one involved the removal of his fibula so surgeons could reconstruct his jawbone. He formed a close relationship with his principal surgeon and spent more months under armed surveillance by police bodyguards. But he was also a celebrity and even had a visit from the French president. Slowly, he began to reemerge into everyday life, and he commenced physical therapy, traveled, and moved back into his apartment. Although calm prevails in the text, Lançon also evinces many worries—including, near the end, mild anxiety about standing near Arabs on a public bus. Evident throughout is the author’s considerable literary knowledge. He read relentlessly in the hospital, and names of significant literary figures populate the narrative: Shakespeare, Proust, Hemingway, Orwell, Henry Miller, Koestler, Edith Wharton. “My new bookshelves gave a second life to the thousands of books that twenty years of shambles had devoured and whose existence had been forgotten,” writes Lançon. “They reappeared like old friends…without alarming me. They were silent, patient. What I had experienced could only nourish the lives they offered me.”
A frank, relentless, gripping memoir that illustrates both man’s inhumanity to man and how quiet resolution can reclaim and restore.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60945-556-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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