Not a happy ending, but nonetheless a lively and appealing memoir.
The author looks back on the history of his family, members of an Ojibway tribe driven out of Wisconsin in the 1850s to settle on an Ontario reserve.
Except for a lesser tendency to commit wholesale massacres, Canada’s treatment of indigenous people was no more enlightened than that of the US. Until very recently, both governments worked hard to wipe out the tribes’ languages and cultures. Ojibway ethnologist and writer Johnston (The Manitous, 1995, etc.) realizes the motives behind this were often well-intentioned; Indian advocates believed adopting white culture was the only way to raise them from poverty. While the policy largely succeeded in alienating indigenous people from their roots, the author points out, the poverty remains. Yet he has not written a polemic but rather a gritty saga of his family’s struggle through the first half of the 20th century. The matriarch was his grandmother Rosa, who raised five sons with only modest help from two husbands. The last of her sons, David, was born with Down Syndrome, called “mongolism” at the time. Unable to care for himself, he was nevertheless strong, curious, and anxious to be part of the world around him. Pragmatically, his older brother John taught him to saw and chop wood. (Readers will be surprised at the immense amount every family required.) When Dave wandered off or created a minor disaster, the community made allowances. No one except the reserve’s white establishment—Indian agent, priest, and doctor, all portrayed unsparingly—suggested sending him to an institution. The author considers his Uncle Dave a symbol of his tribe’s stubborn struggle to preserve their way of life in the face of an intrusive white society. Their success, like Dave’s, was spotty. As the century progressed, the increasingly sophisticated Indians wrested control of their affairs from the government, but they also abandoned the reserve for the city in growing numbers.
Not a happy ending, but nonetheless a lively and appealing memoir.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55263-051-X
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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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