Contrary to its expectation-raising subtitle, a sad story of no compelling current import. For more historical context, see...
Workmanlike biography of the first woman to swim the English Channel demonstrates that fame is fleeting and a moment of youthful glory is no guarantee of a glamorous life.
Associated Press sports columnist Dahlberg (Fight Town: Las Vegas—The Boxing Capital of the World, 2004), aided here by his subject’s niece and by business writer Greene, bases much of his account on newspaper clippings in the personal archives of Gertrude Ederle (1905–2003), supplemented by her unfinished, unpublished memoirs. The authors begin with Ederle’s failed Channel crossing in 1925 and her disappointing performance at the 1924 Olympics (only one gold medal and two bronze). The details of her preparations for the cross-Channel swim in the summer of 1926 and the challenges of the feat are entertainingly recounted, but the narrative begins to falter after that. Dahlberg presents Ederle as an agent of change, citing her design of a body-hugging two-piece silk bathing suit in an era when women wore heavy wool “swimming costumes” that concealed their bodies, and noting the enthusiasm with which feminists greeted her achievement in breaking the men’s speed record for a cross-Channel swim. She was given a ticker-tape parade in New York City and had a brief career in vaudeville before the public lost interest in the shy, stocky, hearing-impaired young woman whose genuine talent for swimming was difficult to capitalize on. Not only was Ederle’s manager a poor businessman, but there was little interest in swimmers for stage or screen. Adding to her difficulties, she broke her pelvis in a fall in 1933. Ederle’s decline into obscurity was halted briefly when Billy Rose hired her for his Aquacade at the 1939 World’s Fair, but the woman who had been named top athlete of the year in 1926 was not even on the ballots in 1944.
Contrary to its expectation-raising subtitle, a sad story of no compelling current import. For more historical context, see Gavin Mortimer’s The Great Swim (2008).Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-38265-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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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