One woman’s quest for the meaning of living beyond her means—a middling memoir.
A study in how compulsive acquisition can lead to untold loss.
Cardella exposes the self-destructive shopaholic tendencies that plagued her throughout early adulthood. Captivated at a young age by the allure of the fashion world depicted in the pages of Vogue, as well as her mother’s glamorous sense of style, the author writes that she first looked to fashion as a mode of self-expression. But soon after her mother’s death in 1989, that expression morphed into self-destructive behavior as Cardella began shopping compulsively, using the physical rush derived from buying clothes and accessories to fill a gaping emotional void. With the eerie intensity of a junkie getting a fix, the author recounts in encyclopedic detail garments worn on pivotal occasions, the arresting pleasure of shopping at exclusive boutiques—“Having a handbag placed in a special silk or flannel sack gave me a secret thrill, and seeing a simple white blouse disappear in a cloud of brightly colored tissue paper was as mesmerizing as a magic trick”—even the sensual appeal of closet hangers holding up her evening gowns: “There were hangers entwined in beautiful pale pink satin, looking as delicate as a ballerina’s toe shoes; hangers that came with their own pearl-tipped push pins with which the thinnest of spaghetti straps could be secured.” Not surprisingly, Cardella’s attempts to heal deep psychological wounds with surface balms led to a string of failed relationships and serious financial woes before she somehow righted the ship. While this confession admirably avoids self-help territory, it reads more like a self-indulgent exercise in retrospection than a serious inquiry into the causes of the author’s affliction.
One woman’s quest for the meaning of living beyond her means—a middling memoir.Pub Date: May 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-03560-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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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