Mokotoff, despite a tendency to dwell on mundane and superficial details, constructs a devastating memoir that is both an...
A tragic memoir of childhood sexual abuse and one man’s struggle to comprehend its lasting repercussions.
The book opens with the death of Mokotoff’s (Fallible, 2009) ex-wife, Tina. After recounting the horrific details of Tina’s demise as the result of years of alcoholism, Mokotoff chronicles the beginning of their relationship. He is the first to admit his initial naïveté about Tina’s penchant for alcohol and evasion of discussing her troubled past, yet as he continues to feign ignorance into the early years of their marriage, it’s hard to sympathize with such persistent denial. Mokotoff’s retrospective observations are also riddled with clunky dialogue and excessively detailed descriptions, such as grocery lists and physical appearances, which inhibit the reader’s ability to feel emotionally connected to the author’s plight. As he continues to recall missed warning signs, Mokotoff peppers the story with enlightening though sometimes awkwardly placed explanations of Tina’s family history. Through these details and Tina’s eventual confession, the reader learns how she and other siblings were all victims of varying degrees of sexual abuse at the hands of an alcoholic stepfather. Unfortunately, Mokotoff doesn’t realize how deeply these experiences affected his wife until it’s too late. Finding solace in drink, Tina manages to hide her alcohol consumption until she finally crosses the line into destructive, inescapable alcoholism. Multiple failed stints in rehab lead to the irrevocable breakdown of the Mokotoff’s marriage as Tina withdraws further into the dark world of addiction and Mokotoff is unable to come to terms with her illness. Sadly, it’s only after the death of Tina and her brother that her remaining family could begin a process of healing; it’s this process that Mokotoff successfully facilitates and relays through his account. In a final and touching part of the memoir, Mokotoff’s teenage daughter Emily reflects on her relationship with her mother. It is here that we finally see a genuine glimpse of Tina that was frustratingly absent in the rest of the book.
Mokotoff, despite a tendency to dwell on mundane and superficial details, constructs a devastating memoir that is both an act of closure and a cautionary tale.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0741469571
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Infinity
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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