A rewarding read about the inner workings of an artistic mind—solid fare for Hemingway enthusiasts looking for a fresh...
A unique biography of Ernest Hemingway’s World War II experience.
At first glance, Hemingway’s decision to volunteer to hunt for German U-boats threatening mercantile ships in the Gulf Stream can be easily absorbed into the author’s tough-guy image, especially considering that the Pilar was a fishing boat on which he could drink and boss other men around on the Navy’s dime. Yet former Navyman Mort’s portrait is far more nuanced. The author views these patrols as a synthesis of life and art, arguing that Hemingway embodied his own existential “Hemingway Hero” during these hunts—or quests, as Hemingway himself preferred to call them. It was this quest that would shape much of Santiago’s saga in The Old Man and the Sea—and, to a lesser extent, Islands in the Stream. At times Mort’s analysis of Hemingway’s words and deeds is overly sympathetic, but his inclusion of Martha Gellhorn’s correspondence adds a welcome perspective on this complicated man. While the information specifically relating to Hemingway’s time aboard the Pilar is stretched quite thin, Mort is strongest in his discussions of boats, the naval history of the period and the mechanics of the elusive U-boat—so strong, in fact, that Hemingway’s quest occasionally takes a back seat to the grander maritime developments of the period. But Mort ably establishes the earnestness at the heart of Hemingway’s quixotic adventure, which was rooted in his deep desire to serve his country and underscored by the unique opportunity to live his art.
A rewarding read about the inner workings of an artistic mind—solid fare for Hemingway enthusiasts looking for a fresh perspective.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9786-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
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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