A memoir recounts a life of tribulations and wordsmithery.
Mach (The Invisible Twins, 2015, etc.) was a precocious youngster, and like so many authors, discovered his love of the written word through voracious reading. He wrote a novel before he even finished high school fashioned in Baroque style (he includes an excerpt), and despite his failure to publish it, a lifetime of devotion to the craft was sparked. Mach received an MBA from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and spent the bulk of his professional career as a market research analyst and business writer. He also tried his hand at several entrepreneurial ventures, and taught advertising and business writing at San Jose State University in California. He experienced some jolts of authorial success—in 1977 he was invited to join the well-regarded California Writer’s Club, and in 1981 he published an article that graced the cover of Writer’s Digest. He trudged through a period of troubles that lasted for nearly 10 years, grappling with serious financial challenges, a cancer scare, his inability to publish a novel he was proud of, and problems finding employment (at one point, he donned a Santa Claus outfit for money). He clashed with a business partner (he briefly owned and operated an ice cream business), and was sued for a substantial sum. All the while, Mach discusses his experiences as creative fodder for future writing, always mining his life for inspiration. His prospects eventually improved, and he found both solace and guidance in religion, not to mention some success as an indie author. This is a quirky and sometimes meandering remembrance, and bears the stamp of a business writer; Mach loves to include bullet-pointed lists cataloging everything from his personal trials to the market research projects he’s written. Mach, a prolific author, lists and excerpts his own work liberally. Unfortunately, the writing, especially for an author’s recollection, is uneven at best. Mach recalls teaching a writing seminar: “I showed attendees how to open up their creative channels so they can come up with methods for sparking new ways to thinking about their writing—whether it be a novel, article, or advertising copy.” In addition, Mach’s account is too idiosyncratic and personal to be of universal import; its primary value will be to those who know and love him.
A charming, but bumpy recollection of a writer’s love of his work.Pub Date: May 5, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Hill Song Press
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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