Others lighting the literary dark in this luminous and appealing collection include Jane Smiley (Charles Dickens), Junot...
In these short essays, writers discuss the works that made them want to write.
New Food Economy senior editor Fassler is also the editor of the Atlantic’s author interview series, “By Heart,” where a number of these essays originally appeared. “Part memoir, part literary criticism, part craft class, part open studio,” the pieces describe the impact or “moment of transformative reading” for each of the contributors. Stephen King’s favorite is the opening line of Douglas Fairbairn’s Shoot: “This is what happened.” “For me," he writes, "this has always been the quintessential opening line. It’s flat and clean as an affidavit.” He then goes on to describe his best opening line, from Needful Things. Khaled Hosseini picks a King story, “The Body.” Its “wonderful” opening “moved me very deeply, and it still does.” In just one page, Walter Mosley describes how two sentences toward the end of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye shook his teenage self “from my waking slumber.” For the first time he realized how language can “reach beyond the real into the metaphysical and into metaphor.” Billy Collins describes the “immediate appeal” of Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” In college, he memorized the “gorgeous” poem and since then has always tried to write his poems with an ear to making them “memorizable.” Poems and fiction dominate the collection, but Tom Perrotta picks a play, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which works a “kind of magic.” And Mark Haddon writes about music, Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew,” which “changed the way I saw the world.” Two writers pick the same poet as their inspiration: Emily Dickinson. Emma Donoghue loves her “enigmatic” “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, and Walt Whitman also get picked twice.
Others lighting the literary dark in this luminous and appealing collection include Jane Smiley (Charles Dickens), Junot Díaz (Toni Morrison), Yiyun Li (Elizabeth Bowen), Neil Gaiman (R.A. Lafferty), and Michael Chabon (Jorge Luis Borges).Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-14-313084-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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