A writer explores her personal connections to author Rachel Field.
“Something happens during the writing of a biography that feels a lot like falling in love,” Wood writes in her prologue, explaining her intense drive to tell the story of Field, a Newbery Award–winning novelist and poet active in the early 20th century. After purchasing Field’s summer home on Sutton Island, Maine, Wood found herself surrounded by Field’s last remaining possessions and “lingering wisps of [her] creative energy.” Through meticulous research, Wood uses letters and poems to reconstruct Field’s life, from her childhood at the turn of the century to her hard-won success as a children’s author. Field’s childhood in an illustrious family provided inspiration for her legacy, but it was her unrequited love for a gay Southern gentleman and insecurities about her appearance that Wood believes inspired Field’s best poems and her “wonderful” adult novel Time out of Mind (1935), which earned a Kirkus Star, both somewhat overlooked following her death. Field would eventually find love and relocate to California, witnessing the early, bustling days of Hollywood. She tried to build a family until her untimely and surprising death. Interwoven throughout this story are letters directly from Wood to Field detailing her unfaltering admiration and how Field’s story took Wood on her own journeys across the country and on to finding her own voice as a writer. Wood makes some admirable attempts to take some critical distance from Field. She provides insightful analysis of Field’s work, discusses the two women’s similar, yet vastly different, struggles over career and family, and even addresses Field’s privilege and seemingly racist remarks. But Wood always returns to effusive, consistent admiration for her subject matter. Readers may not walk away with the same devotion and excitement that Wood desperately wants to share, but her passionate prose and carefully curated primary sources will certainly convince readers that Field is not a writer to overlook.
An eloquent, detailed tribute to a less well-known but inspiring author.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-045-1
Page Count: 392
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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A refreshing celebrity memoir focused not strictly on the self but on a much larger horizon.
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One of Hollywood’s biggest stars delivers a memoir of success won through endless, relentless work and self-reckoning.
“My imagination is my gift, and when it merges with my work ethic, I can make money rain from the heavens.” So writes Smith, whose imagination is indeed a thing of wonder—a means of coping with fear, an abusive father with the heart of a drill instructor, and all manner of inner yearnings. The author’s imagination took him from a job bagging ice in Philadelphia to initial success as a partner in the Grammy-winning rap act DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Smith was propelled into stardom thanks to the ministrations of Quincy Jones, who arranged an audition in the middle of his own birthday party, bellowing “No paralysis through analysis!” when Smith begged for time to prepare. The mantra—which Jones intoned 50-odd times during the two hours it took for the Hollywood suits to draw up a contract for the hit comedy series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—is telling, for hidden within this memoir lies a powerful self-help book. For Smith, all of life is a challenge in which one’s feelings are largely immaterial. “I watched my father’s negative emotions seize control of his ample intellect and cause him over and over again to destroy beautiful parts of our family,” he writes, good reason for him to sublimate negativity in the drive to get what he wanted—money, at first, and lots of it, which got him in trouble with the IRS in the early 1990s. Smith, having developed a self-image that cast him as a coward, opines that one’s best life is lived by facing up to the things that hold us back. “I’ve been making a conscious effort to attack all the things that I’m scared of,” he writes, adding, “And this is scary.” It’s a good lesson for any aspiring creative to ponder—though it helps to have Smith’s abundant talent, too.
A refreshing celebrity memoir focused not strictly on the self but on a much larger horizon.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984877-92-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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