Honestly and perceptively explores the strains of a peacenik/warrior relationship.
Can a Berkeley feminist social activist find happiness with a gung-ho Oakland police officer?
Raday met Barrett on a blind date, an event she initially viewed as a sociological experiment. She swiftly discovered that he was more complex than the stereotypical gun-toting cop. Several years later, after breakups and couples therapy, they married. Up to this point her account of her reservations about their basic cultural differences have a light touch. Besides a clear understanding of who she is and what she wants, Raday has a solid sense of humor, an ear for dialogue and an eye for telling detail. After 9/11, his usual reminders to her—“Remember, stay in Condition Yellow” (a state of awareness of danger and readiness to deal with it)—no longer seemed quite so paranoid. A major shift in their relationship came when Barrett, a West Point graduate and an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, discovered that his sense of honor and duty would not permit him to go ahead with his planned retirement, to Raday’s dismay. His commitment to the Army and hers to family—by now they had a son—were in direct conflict. As disagreement over the war in Iraq sharpened, Raday writes, “I felt a chasm developing in our country, with the deepest crack running right through my heart and my marriage.” Uprooted from California when her husband decided to attend the Army War College in Pennsylvania, she found herself a misfit among the other Army spouses, and became increasingly isolated when he was deployed to Iraq. As the misery index goes up, the laughter fades. Her earlier attempts to get inside her husband’s mind, to understand a way of thinking so different from her own and to convince him that his views were wrong are replaced by a somber acceptance of the fact that their worlds are in separate orbits. At the memoir’s end, the future of their marriage remains uncertain.
Honestly and perceptively explores the strains of a peacenik/warrior relationship.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7283-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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