A stifling and heartless tale: Daum isn’t sorry to see the demise of her childhood way of life, but she cannot adequately...
A grim tale purporting to explain the pull of a place (the ranchland of South Dakota) that succeeds mainly in making those lucky readers who have never lived in that high dry country feel luckier still.
Daum grew up in south-central South Dakota, where she continues to raise horses for a half of each year on a dwindled portion of the family farm (her stake is now 130 acres, down from the 13,000 her father once owned). This is not a landscape for the weak or the fearful, for it is the home of monstrous hailstorms, seven-year droughts, and the sudden death of crops, animals, and children. “You have to be ready to die alone when you live eighty miles from the nearest hospital. There’s no telling when.” Daum experiences cruelty from the weather and the barbed wire and the predations of the ranch hands, and it seems to go on forever, like the grassland. But what she chooses to remember is the still and the quiet and the openness of the far horizon. Occasionally this sense of place is drawn out into the light in highly descriptive episodes—riding fences, hanging over the edge of a rise and looking an eagle in the eye, attending to foaling and calving—lightly buffed with emotion, when Daum’s attraction to the land is understandable and her writing possesses power and becomes memorable. And she sometimes turns a lovely image (“The sky was a whirlpool of cranes”)—although just as often she churns out a hackneyed one (“I remember thinking that if the stars had voices they might sing like this”). What becomes grating, though, is her high, lonesome, and spare voice, which in its mimicry of place feels posed: “I learned about silence from the land” or “at night I dream of coyotes.”
A stifling and heartless tale: Daum isn’t sorry to see the demise of her childhood way of life, but she cannot adequately make clear the reasons for her continued attachment to the site of all that misery.Pub Date: June 18, 2001
ISBN: 1-57131-255-2
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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