by William C. Carter ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2000
A masterful life of the eccentric pioneer who mapped the modern mind in Remembrance of Things Past (more accurately
translated here as In Search of Lost Time), by the noted Proust scholar (French/Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham; The Proustian Quest, not reviewed). In seeking to reveal how one of the century’s towering novelists (1871–1922) "came to produce what is arguably the most brilliant, sustained prose narration in the history of literature," Carter has produced a long, loving annotation to the autobiographical In Search. He explores his subject with a scholar's care, a novelist's eye, and a generous tolerance for readers without French. His hero is invariably ill, most often with asthma, a condition he exacerbates with drugs, a nocturnal lifestyle, and an erratic diet (in his last days he consumes only ice cream and beer; his death follows his adamant refusal to accept medical treatment for pneumonia). Proust's legendary eccentricities are on full display: his cork-lined living quarters (to ensure the quiet he craves), his vampirish avoidance of daylight, his endless revisions of his texts (In Search requires "one of the most demanding productions in the history of publishing"), and his prodigality (he recklessly spends nearly all of his enormous inheritance). Noting the fascination of Proust’s lifestyle for contemporary readers, Carter labors to explain his complicated sexuality (he fights a duel with a reviewer who has suggested he is gay, but he also pursues young men, regarding waiters at the Ritz as a particular delicacy) and is determined to establish that Proust "never attempted to deny his Jewish heritage." Not even Carter's considerable narrative gifts, however, can make Proust's bedridden later years, marked by a contentious, complicated correspondence with his publisher, as compelling as his early, more extroverted life. A prodigious work, rich and racy, informed by fact, animated by imagination, utterly worthy of its wondrous subject. (47
illus., not seen)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-300-08145-6
Page Count: 1024
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
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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More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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