A romantically challenged Londoner offers new strategies on playing the dating game, attempting to “make sense of something he doesn’t understand, using something that he does.”
With only a six-week duration as his relationship “personal best time,” Nicolson, a 20-something trainee solicitor for a British law firm, parlays his studies in economics and politics at Edinburgh University into unorthodox ways to view love, improve his chances at romance and demonstrate a correlation between love and the “clear-cut rational world of economics.” Applying the dismal science to the love game, the author explores online dating, where one’s “goods” are presented, displayed, brokered, ordered and possibly exchanged. “Playing hard to get” increases your demand by not overstocking and oversimplifying intentions. Nicolson shares personal dating anecdotes that range from the humorous to the cringe-worthy and astutely equates a fizzling love life with didactic market principles, complemented with graphs and charts. His sage best friend and patient sounding board Flora offers counsel, but her stern advice does little to dissuade his course of action, which can be outwardly sexist and overstated, as in a long-winded chapter involving the long wine lists at higher-end restaurants. Some correlations are cleverer than others, as when Nicolson establishes an economic correlation with the nice-guys-versus-bad-boys equation or how the eternal tug of war between the (married) sexes can be measured using market force predictors. After a long dry stretch, Nicolson admits to successfully dating a girl for a year, yet he eventually forgoes the strong, safe, bankable investment of a long-term relationship for the free-form “liquidity” of the single life. A chapter on Keynesian economics restores his confidence in himself and in love.
A not always convincing, mostly amusing glimpse at the grinding gears of the young male in pursuit of love and economic stability.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3041-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Marble Arch/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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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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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