A slightly bloated but addictive memoir of self-destruction, recuperation and a literary coming-of-age.
An avant-garde writer recalls his journey from gutter drunk to PEN American member.
Kaufman (Matches, 2005, etc.) throws in his lot with the boozer bards in this second memoir about his near-lethal alcohol addiction, recovery and long struggle to become a writer. After touching briefly on his horrific childhood in the Bronx as the son of a French Jewish Holocaust survivor who beat him mercilessly (the territory of his first memoir, Jew Boy, 2000), Kaufman details his traumatizing years with the Israel Defense Forces and his torrid, adulterous affair (which inspired his novel Matches). Kaufman’s blackout drinking is epic throughout and reaches a crescendo when he returns to New York suffering psychotic delusions from PTSD sustained in the Israeli Army. The author’s narrative whips schizophrenically between manic moments of literary self-aggrandizing and deeply depressive moments of shocking wreckage (“Awoke in gutters or curled up to keep warm on manhole covers and grates in cul-de-sacs, filthy, nauseous, hungover, astonished at my gargantuan appetite for the abyss”). Acceptance into Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts program, his involvement with the emerging Spoken Word poetry scene and the birth of his daughter briefly buoyed him, but not enough to keep him from the bottle. Eventually he hit rock bottom and was kicked out of a crash pad by his acid-dealer roommates, becoming homeless. Kaufman’s sexual perversions sometimes serve his theme of bondage, but occasionally veer into misogyny. Literature literally saved the author, on a bench in New York’s Tompkins Square Park when a fellow poet talked him into trying recovery, and the second half of the book follows Kaufman’s journey to sobriety in San Francisco. The author’s intention to stake his territory among the literary elite is clear, but such efforts can feel name-droppy at times (an anecdote about desperately seeking Isaac Bashevis Singer at his Upper West Side apartment is interesting, but a listing of Kaufman’s Columbia classmates is not). Although the author’s tendency to drop the “I” from his sentence often feels affected, it also occasionally hit its mark, lending a hard edge to Kaufman’s largely intoxicating prose.
A slightly bloated but addictive memoir of self-destruction, recuperation and a literary coming-of-age.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-936740-02-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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