by Aaron Cohen with Christine Buckley ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2009
A high-action, low-analysis memoir of a commendable life.
Adventures of a peripatetic human-rights activist committed to exposing the horrors of modern-day slavery and freeing its victims.
Cohen—whose past includes an addiction to street drugs and a business/creative partnership with Jane’s Addiction leader Perry Farrell—transformed himself into a dedicated activist in the early 1990s after his mother was diagnosed with cancer. He began studying Hebrew and working on Jubilee, a peace-through-music movement seeking to lower the debt of third-world countries and to free coerced workers. Journalist Buckley profiled Cohen in an award-winning 2007 article that appeared in LA Weekly. Here she aids him in recounting his escapades in Cambodia, Sudan, Ecuador, Myanmar, Israel and Iraq, among other countries. Cohen’s job, which he refers to as “night frighting,” was to pose as a sex-hungry tourist. He would visit a brothel, select a young girl from a lineup, go with her to her room, gain her confidence, tape an interview and take photos to document the visit. Using the information he gained, agencies made arrests, rescued the girls and placed them in protective custody. Cohen took great personal risks, sometimes getting caught in the crossfire of rival gangs, sometimes being forced to hide and flee the country. The graphic details of his nighttime activities contrast sharply with the quiet hotel scenes, where Cohen said prayers for his father and meditated on passages from the Book of Job. During part of his time abroad, the author was also responsible for the care of his terminally ill father back in California, a task that caused him deep distress and the details of which are disturbing. While Cohen tosses in some statistics and reports on the actions being taken by others, this is not an overview of sex trafficking or any other form of forced labor; it is a personal story of one man’s campaign to rescue its victims. An epilogue urges readers to get involved and provides links to various human-rights groups.
A high-action, low-analysis memoir of a commendable life.Pub Date: June 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4169-6117-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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by Aaron Cohen and Douglas Century
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 25, 2010
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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