by Vaclav Havel & translated by Paul Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2007
An illuminating memoir by an admirable writer and leader.
The noted Czech dramatist and politician turns in a “strange little book” recounting his years in office.
The castle in question is the one in which Havel (The Art of the Impossible, 1997, etc.) lived while serving for 13 years as the Czech president. To judge by his occasional grumblings, the castle is at times Kafka’s, too. Havel blends formal memoir, vignette, anecdote and notes and memos scribbled out to assistants and ministers, sometimes impatiently (“I’ve written the first draft of the German speech…. As usual I would welcome it if there were no…micro-essays on the margins of the theme.”) He opens his narrative at the Library of Congress and immediately heads down memory lane to his first trip to the U.S. in 1968. Velvet Underground albums in hand, he came home just in time to face down the Soviet tanks that crushed the period of political liberalization known as the Prague Spring; he would be in trouble with one authority or another until 1989 and the Velvet Revolution, whereupon he was pushed into office by popular acclaim. Havel likens this, not entirely positively, to a fairy tale, “if not pure kitsch,” but it is quite clear that he took his duties most seriously in office, wrestling with such problems as how to effect the desired separation of Czechoslovakia into two republics and reconcile his own inclination toward pacifism with supporting NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and, at the end of his final term, the invasion of Iraq. Throughout, Havel is literary without being arch, nicely philosophical and a little worried about the state of the world—and even vexed by such things as American television’s running commercials during the funeral of his friend John Paul II. And then there are always the details of living in a castle: “In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it?”
An illuminating memoir by an admirable writer and leader.Pub Date: May 17, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-26641-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
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