Anyone who knows France will recognize this as a half-cooked canard. Anyone who wants to know about what distinguishes...
Those irritating Frenchies. Only they would see America as “the worst kind of beautiful woman: a powerful woman that we desire but feel unworthy of and whom we must therefore degrade.”
Thus spoke actor-singer Yves Montand in an interview with onetime U.S. News & World Report correspondent Chesnoff (Pack of Thieves, 1999)—and if the urbane Montand thought of America so, then imagine what ill thoughts your average perfidious Parisian must be harboring about us. Of course, Montand was Italian, just as the famously anti-American Jean-Paul Sartre was Belgian. But never mind: The French liked them, so they go on the suspect list, for, by Chesnoff’s account, the French and their ilk suffer from fundamental and fatal flaws: They insist on speaking French, despite “the diminished utility of French in worldly affairs,” insist on nursing Cartesian concepts, insist on insisting that they have a place at the world table. Plus they opposed the Iraq invasion, and some of them helped the Germans during WWII, which makes them surrender monkeys. Plus “France is a vertical society where rules and regulations come from on high,” whereas America is ruled by consensus. (Did you ever doubt it?) Plus they like Jerry Lewis and Michael Moore—and Chesnoff doesn’t even get around to Mickey Rourke. Only readers who take such premises seriously will enjoy Chesnoff’s diatribe, expressed in sideways assertions that, for instance, our media are superior to theirs because we stopped paying attention to Janet Jackson’s breasts after a while, whereas they’re still fixated on “an aging Belgian-born pop star named Johnny Halliday” (that would be “Hallyday,” monsieur). None of which keeps Chesnoff from maintaining a residence in the Midi, where his neighbors, of course, are rude to him just because they’re French and can’t help it. . . .
Anyone who knows France will recognize this as a half-cooked canard. Anyone who wants to know about what distinguishes France from the U.S. can read Raymonde Carroll’s infinitely superior Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience (1990). That leaves the freedom-fry crowd, and they’re welcome to this book.Pub Date: April 25, 2005
ISBN: 1-59523-010-6
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Sentinel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that...
A man who spent four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit tells his shocking story.
Born in 1947 in the “Negro” wing of a New Orleans hospital, Woodfox helped his family eke out survival through petty crimes. Though he showed academic potential, he left high school before graduation, spending his time on streets patrolled by mostly white police officers, who “came through our neighborhood picking up black men for standing on the corner, charging them with loitering or vagrancy, looking to meet their quota of arrests. Once in custody, who knows what charges would be put on those men.” Arrested at 18, the author entered Angola penitentiary, where his defiance and his affiliation with a nonviolent chapter of the Black Panther Party led to racist, sadistic guards targeting him. When a white prison guard was mysteriously murdered while on duty, prison officials framed Woodfox for the killing despite his detailed presentation of evidence that another inmate had committed the crime. The bulk of the book chronicles the author’s solitary confinement over the next 40 years. In many cases, inmates subjected to these brutal conditions slowly lose their sanity and sometimes commit suicide. Woodfox explains how he overcame those odds despite relentless despair. Through a series of unusual occurrences, public-interest lawyers and other prison reformers learned about his treatment. The activists began building a two-pronged case, advocating for a declaration of innocence regarding the murder and seeking an end to Woodfox’s solitary confinement. Though the author is obviously not an impartial source, that understandable bias mingles throughout the narrative with fierce intelligence and the author’s touching loyalty to fellow prisoners also being brutalized. Nearly every page of the book is depressing because of the inhumane treatment of the prisoners, which often surpasses comprehension. But it’s an important story for these times, and readers will cheer the author’s eventual re-entry into society.
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that it never could happen in real life.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2908-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.
New York Times columnist Brooks (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, 2011, etc.) returns with another volume that walks the thin line between self-help and cultural criticism.
Sandwiched between his introduction and conclusion are eight chapters that profile exemplars (Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne are textual roommates) whose lives can, in Brooks’ view, show us the light. Given the author’s conservative bent in his column, readers may be surprised to discover that his cast includes some notable leftists, including Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day, and A. Philip Randolph. (Also included are Gens. Eisenhower and Marshall, Augustine, and George Eliot.) Throughout the book, Brooks’ pattern is fairly consistent: he sketches each individual’s life, highlighting struggles won and weaknesses overcome (or not), and extracts lessons for the rest of us. In general, he celebrates hard work, humility, self-effacement, and devotion to a true vocation. Early in his text, he adapts the “Adam I and Adam II” construction from the work of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Adam I being the more external, career-driven human, Adam II the one who “wants to have a serene inner character.” At times, this veers near the Devil Bugs Bunny and Angel Bugs that sit on the cartoon character’s shoulders at critical moments. Brooks liberally seasons the narrative with many allusions to history, philosophy, and literature. Viktor Frankl, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Tillich, William and Henry James, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf—these are but a few who pop up. Although Brooks goes after the selfie generation, he does so in a fairly nuanced way, noting that it was really the World War II Greatest Generation who started the ball rolling. He is careful to emphasize that no one—even those he profiles—is anywhere near flawless.
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9325-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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