An inspirational story of survival and the loving bond between sisters.
Virag’s memoir paints a bleak portrait of a broken childhood, but her strength shines amid the rubble.
In the early 1940s, Virag and four of her siblings were forced into a big, black car and taken away from their home by the Children’s Aid Society. She was never told why; she was 4 years old. Though poverty-stricken, Virag had always felt love from her mother and an older sister, “Muggs,” who helped care for the younger children (Virag’s mother had 18 children total). Virag’s home life was hardly idyllic—her rowdy older brothers gave her canned molasses to quiet her when she cried from hunger—but it was far better than where she ended up. Plunged into foster care, the children were often abused and used for labor. Virag and her twin sister, Betty, performed grueling, dangerous work on a tobacco farm and were locked in an attic at night with no heat other than a stovepipe, which provided minimal warmth and became a comfort of sorts for the girls. Virag’s plainspoken style makes for a powerful read. At one point, the children are so hungry they eat sassafras leaves. When the girls slice open their bare toes while hoeing, Virag describes how they “simply rinsed off the blood and went back to hoeing.” Readers should prepare to be angered and moved to tears: One of the most heartbreaking scenes involves the rape of Betty when she is 7 years old. But there are better times and even much “whistling in the dark” humor, as the author does a beautiful job of capturing the voices of childhood. The book is a swift, well-written read and not merely an indictment of the foster-care system. There is compassion from some adults, such as a foster-care worker who helped Virag enroll in art classes during her high school years. Amazingly, Virag’s voice is not bitter, as she plumbs the depths of despair and rises above what no child should ever have to endure.
An inspirational story of survival and the loving bond between sisters.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1936782307
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Langdon Street
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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