A compelling and well-crafted combination of history and autobiography.
A kid with a difficult childhood learns to be a capable Air Force officer and father in this debut military memoir.
Saddam Hussein is not often cited as an influence in child-rearing tactics, but retired Lt. Col. Riley learned some relevant lessons during the decade-plus he spent serving as part of the bulwark against the dictator’s rule. “I saw firsthand what Saddam Hussein did to Kuwait by traveling it from end to end, and I touched the scars he left behind,” recalls the author of the tour he spent in Kuwait in 1999, right before his son was born. “I also spent time with survivors of the invasion who were building a good life for themselves and a better Kuwait.” This mission—cleaning up the destruction left behind by a figure of authority—mirrored, to some extent, the work Riley had been doing since his own childhood, and it gave him the confidence he needed for his own impending fatherhood. With this memoir, he tells of his formative years with his violent, mentally ill mother and often absent father and how their combustive household led him to seek the structure of the Air Force. During his career as an intelligence analyst—a job that was largely defined by America’s wars against the Iraqi strongman—the author evolved from a kid out of high school seeking validation to an expert in his field. More importantly, he grew to be the kind of man who did not pass on the sins of his parents. Riley’s prose is exact and features moments of unexpected beauty, as here when he describes being stationed across the border from Basra, Iraq: “Under blackout conditions, from our highest perimeter wall, I still couldn’t see the lights of Basra, just a lime-green smudge in a sky punctured by hard stars that made it look like a nebula.” As much an account of America’s involvement in Kuwait and Iraq as it is a personal narrative, the book provides a humanizing insight into the individuals who fight the nation’s wars and the deeper motivations that explain why they do so.
A compelling and well-crafted combination of history and autobiography.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61254-292-8
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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