Acclaimed fiction writer Banks (A Permanent Member of the Family, 2013, etc.) turns an able hand to nonfiction in this expansive, elegiac reflection on the pleasures and deceptions of travel.
The 75-year-old author recognizes the failings of narratives based solely on fading, self-serving memories, yet he cannot resist indulging in recollections from 30 years ago. “A memoir is like a travel book,” he writes. “Whether short or long it's a radical reduction of remembered reality and is structured as much by what it leaves out as what it puts in.” In the lengthy title essay, set in 1988, Banks and his soon-to-be-fourth wife embark on a wide-ranging odyssey of the Caribbean, one that wakens many ghosts (of wives and adventures past) while conjuring encouragement and despair in equal measure. The author loves the Caribbean and its people but loathes what is happening to the islands to accommodate, then as now, ever increasing hordes of cruise-ship and package-tour visitors, to homogenize distinctive cultures, and to obscure the real history of slavery. Resolution was a principal reason that Banks, who lived for a time in Jamaica, undertook this return journey to the tropics. Written in 2015, the piece is at least as much about Banks' courtship narrative, his personal history, and his regrets as it is about an enviable assignment in the Caribbean. But the frequent self-flagellation occasionally feels excessive. The other essays in the book are less melancholy, offering observations and insights that, despite their ages, seem timeless. After all, the point of travel is knowledge, not topical information. Of the more “conventional” travel pieces here, the most resonant and vivid are those on the Everglades and the author’s mountaineering in South America and the Himalayas, the last at age 72.
Banks' ecological warnings might strike even the most fervent environmentalist as rather apocalyptic, yet in the best of these pieces, his clarity of vision and muscular prose are as transporting as a mountain ascent.Pub Date: May 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-185767-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP
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PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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