Poignant and raw; a commemoration of a family.
In this debut memoir, the only surviving member of a dysfunctional family explores the internal demons that plagued her loved ones.
“I’m the last person alive in my immediate family,” Bloom tells readers right up front. Before finishing the first page, the audience knows that both of the author’s brothers, Marshall and Alan, committed suicide. Her father was a thriving, functional alcoholic. And her mother, dutiful keeper of the hearth and social propriety, was often consumed either by sadness or rage. As the last in her line—the last to remember and be able to tell their story—Bloom looks back to gain greater understanding and acceptance of a nuclear family filled with dissension, miscommunication, and alienation. She begins by describing her grandparents. Her mother’s parents (Celia and Hyman Gershkovitz) and her dad’s father (Pizer Bloom) were Jewish Polish immigrants. Her paternal grandmother (Ida Bloom) was born in New York City but was the daughter of Jewish Polish immigrants. Both families wound up in Denver, where their respective offspring, Lillian Gershkovitz and Sam Bloom, met. The author’s parents wed in 1937, and she, their middle child and only daughter, was born in 1941. Turbulence at home and the social upheavals of the ’60s sent the siblings in different directions. Bloom’s articulate narrative follows a general chronological order but also moves back and forth in time as she examines her relationship with each family member. The account is peppered with some singular, intimate portraits of Denver’s mid-20th-century Orthodox Jewish community. Recalling a visit to her maternal grandparents, whom she called Zayda and Bubbie, Bloom writes: “Peering in the bathtub, I saw a large, live fish. Zayda had bought a carp so Bubbie could make gefilte fish for Pesach.” But these lighter episodes are the exception. Mostly, this is an exposure of the dynamics that left three adult offspring (all of them childless) feeling isolated and insecure. Of her own survival and success, Bloom concludes: “I...had the better luck and timing.” Family photographs reveal the happier moments.
Poignant and raw; a commemoration of a family.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72290-972-7
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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