A lyrical character sketch, vivid even through the smoky glass of time.
Orange Prize–winning novelist Berne (The Ghost at the Table, 2006, etc.) shapes a lovely, melancholic biography of her grandmother, despite modest background information.
Because her grandmother left little behind when she died in 1932, the author admits to feeling at times like she is writing a ghost story. “I have to do a little historical tap dancing,” writes Berne, and she has a suave way of going about the process. It helps that she writes with polish and insight: “bereavement, like passion, has no proper notion of scale, and what form it takes depends mostly on the character of the mourner.” That bereavement was nurtured by her father, who lost his mother—Lucile Kroger Berne, daughter of the Cincinnati supermarket king—when he was six. With this biography, the author tenders a well-turned portrait of him as well—restless, irritable, charming, sympathetic, envious. Berne worked with what was available, including a few diaries and photo albums, but her greatest asset was Lucile’s milieu. Cincinnati at the turn of the century was a memorable place, and the rise of the Kroger supermarket empire becomes a satisfying rags-to-riches story in Berne’s capable hands. Lucile played a role in the creation of that empire, only to be shunted aside when her brothers returned from war. In addition to archival resources, the author taps the acumen of Susan Sontag, Ambrose Bierce, Virginia Woolf and others, rendering Lucile as a significant presence on the Wellesley College campus, where she matriculated, and during the year she spent in France helping knit the country together after World War I. Photographs from Lucile’s albums provide further context to her life.
A lyrical character sketch, vivid even through the smoky glass of time.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56512-625-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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