The author's memories of early adolescence, as taken from her rediscovered diaries. Israeloff (In Confidence, 1989), a contributing editor at Parents magazine and the mother of two, found her diaries and began reliving her experiences in the eighth grade. A former honors student, Israeloff relates with astonishing accounting skills the exact score on nearly every test she took in that pivotal year. Though the diaries read like the awkward scribblings of a precocious adolescent, Israeloff the grown-up has determined to see something more sinister: the ghost of the success she would have been if she were a boy. ``Rutherford,'' her father's pet name for her, takes on enormous weight and serves as a tired metaphor for the male child Israeloff was not. It is an unfortunate choice. Israeloff's adult musings are forced, and her recollections of the eighth grade are mercilessly mined for evidence of academic deprivation: An item of crude graffiti on one of Israeloff's student-council campaign posters is rendered in heartbreaking terms, although the author admits that she had forgotten the incident until the diary brought it back to her. A long series of A+ papers and other accomplishments contradict the complaints of Israeloff that, as a female, she was overlooked. Vague references to studies showing that women lose academic courage in high school are not borne out in Israeloff's case by the text, which covers her high school years in a few short paragraphs. Israeloff reaches her stride in gentle reminiscences of her father, but her broad generalizations about her home life lack nuance. The obligatory visit to her old school is sadly lifeless, and her amorphous rage at a former doting teacher offers an ugly end to this memoir. The star of her eighth-grade class, devoted as a young girl to logical argument, has produced a narrative stocked with sweeping statements ill supported by facts.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80081-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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