A recollection of the people, the sights, sounds, smells—the feel—of a boyhood in a harsh and splendid time in America.
Hynes (The Soldiers’ Tale, 1997, etc.), now a near-80 professor emeritus (Literature/Princeton), was motherless at five. He grew up in various places until his father settled in Minneapolis and married again. The Great Depression, seemingly permanent, was at its nadir. It was a time when folks made do or did without. It was a hard time and, in many ways, a happy time, too. Kids might easily get into trouble, but not into danger. Many people never bothered to lock their cars or front doors. Each night, though, Sam’s father ritually latched his door. He was independent, striving, and never quite making it, married to a decent, frugal, hardworking stepmother to his two boys. As his son recalls him, his father was gentle and good. Trust the author’s memory. He remembers the seasons: the halcyon summer on a farm, culminating by a view of a stallion servicing a mare (“something heroic . . . like a parade or a brass band”), and the Minnesota winter, with laundry frozen on the line and snow that made distance evaporate. With him we play cops and robbers again (the little kids are the cops), listen to radio serials, graduate finally to long pants and discover jazz. We edit the high-school newspaper, take Manual Training, and encounter, fumbling, the opposite sex. The tale closes, not ends, as the nearly grown-up boy enters WWII. It is nothing really extraordinary, nothing uncommon; it’s just a story told with uncommon narrative skill. Past tense frequently gives way to present tense, present again in those youthful days now long past. It’s a work evocative for those who remember just which war was The War and instructive to everyone else. The trip to the author’s bountiful root cellar of memory is augmented with snapshots and clippings.
Comfortable as an old cardigan and more than simple nostalgia: a memoir in turns sagacious and poignant, the way it ought to be.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03193-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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