Much broader than a lesbian-interest title, this book will resonate with many readers, regardless of sexual orientation,...
A passionate, intricately composed memoir of the author’s long-term love relationship, set against the backdrop of their Minneapolis neighborhood and complicated family ties.
With colorful, witty, richly woven prose, Borich (Restoring the Color of Roses) invites the reader into a life that is at once ordinary and wholly unique. Alternating between different years in her relationship, and leading up to her actual wedding, Borich’s narrative unfolds like a patchwork quilt. She offers sketches of her family, daily dog walks, city noises and urban dramas, her collection of kitschy Madonna art, and her lover’s obsession with motorcycles and birdwatching. Though clearly a romantic, Borich is no fool. She acknowledges the precariousness of permanence even as her prose swirls around her and her lover’s entwined feet: "I doubt our lives or loves are predetermined...Much of the time I get to choose, and I don't need a psychic to tell me which is the happier destiny. Today I choose to cling to this world, to Linnea’s arm, as the planet where we live inches around its axis again and we breathe in and out, wondering what will happen tomorrow." Borich does skimp a bit on the nitty-gritty of tensions, problems, and arguments that must have arisen over 12 years of partnership. But if she errs on the side of bliss, she does so by staying rooted in everyday experience. She is similarly egalitarian in her portrayal of family members and the ways in which heterosexual bonding is awarded more legitimacy by her parents, aunts, and cousins. One of the moving aspects of the book is how some of these family members shift over the years toward more acceptance of Borich and her "lesbian husband."
Much broader than a lesbian-interest title, this book will resonate with many readers, regardless of sexual orientation, bringing a nod of recognition to some, a twinge of longing to others.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55597-292-6
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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