An odd but enthusiastic mix of schoolgirl anecdote, American travelogue and mysticism.
Sebastian’s debut memoir, ranging from a French boarding school to life in Texas, describes the near-death experience that prompted her belief in God.
“As Unbelievable / And Even At Times Impossible / As They Might Seem / These Events Are All Real,” Sebastian claims in an overblown epigraph to her spiritual memoir. This might suggest a fantastical story, but it’s a straightforward, chronological account of Sebastian’s teens and 20s—with a mystical experience appended. The book begins with Sebastian leaving Spain for Largenté, a strict Catholic boarding school in southwest France. She deftly paints her falsely rosy picture of what an all-girls school would be like: “…pillow fights, girl chats by the Dorm’s fireplace, giggling in lacy gowns dreaming of a romantic future while braiding our hair.” Instead, arriving late on her first day, she was given penance for not addressing the nuns by proper titles. She quickly learned to stifle her individuality and perform rote actions unquestioningly. Influenced by Stoics and existentialists, Sebastian was melancholy until a new friend, Michelle, arrived from Houston. Intrigued by Michelle’s yearbooks, Sebastian decided to move to Texas after graduation. College presented a difficult decision between two suitors as well as much agonizing over evolution. Though unconvinced by the theory, Sebastian resisted the seeming alternative of superstitious religion—until a spring break car accident that should have killed her (she incurred multiple skull fractures and brain hematomas, as evidenced in the appendix’s medical reports) convinced her of God’s existence. Like Blaise Pascal, she had a mystical experience in which she heard Jesus speak. Sebastian vividly evokes each setting and remembers her teen angst with notable recreated dialogue, but the religious preoccupation feels like a hidden agenda. Still, she often writes lyrically, as when remembering “the blended mist of calming beauty and inner inquietude.” Possessives, plurals, verb forms, punctuation and capitalization pose problems—“The three of us joined the large group of girls going together towards the Hallway leading to the English Language class”—in addition to homonym slips and dangling modifiers; all could be ameliorated by a native speaker’s thorough edit. Additionally, translation of every French phrase feels superfluous.
An odd but enthusiastic mix of schoolgirl anecdote, American travelogue and mysticism.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499756555
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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