A well-crafted portrait of growing up biracial in the United States.
From the executive story editor of Scrubs, a terrific memoir about her Philadelphia childhood.
Nissel’s mother, a Black Panther from West Philadelphia, married a white man from upstate Pennsylvania; together they had two children. “Where are you from?” was the refrain Nissel and her brother most often heard from whites; from blacks, it was, “You talk white.” Determined to find her niche, she tried to become “more authentically black” by wearing cornrows, which lasted until she dived underwater at the local pool. She also considered Judaism, reflecting, “They have their own school and their own language. It’s like a club.” (A friend replied: “Well, for your sake, it’d better be a nice club because being black and Jewish, you won’t be able to get into any other ones.”) After her philandering father abandoned them, the family moved frequently, living—and earning equal doses of scorn—in neighborhoods both poor and wealthy. While a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Nissel posted an online journal about her financial struggles that was later published as The Broke Diaries (not reviewed). But it wasn’t poverty that led to her brief hospitalization for clinical depression during college; despite her quips about racism, endless queries regarding her ethnicity proved wearing. A fellow student in what Nissel jokingly refers to as the “Nation of Islam Lite” broke off their friendship, citing as her reason, “a child is the race of his father.” During a temporary gig with the IRS, a white female coworker asked her to recommend books about “the black experience.” Eventually, Nissel decided to try her fortunes on the West Coast, where she seems to be thriving. Readers will be grateful that she’s willing to revisit her challenging past: Colorful anecdotes, marvelous dialogue and a thoughtful narrative make this memoir a delight.
A well-crafted portrait of growing up biracial in the United States.Pub Date: March 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-48114-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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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