A hauntingly evocative wartime memoir by a concentration camp inmate and medic. Published in Slovene in 1967, the book is especially notable for its stark descriptions, eloquently translated here in such passages as, ``When skin turns to parchment and thighs are as thick as ankles, then the mind flickers like a dying battery.'' The survivor-narrator, accompanied by the phantoms of his past, stalks among a group of tourists and their guide who are visiting a concentration camp in the Vosges Mountains where he spent much of the war (he also spent time in Belsen, Harzungen, Dachau, and Natzweiller). Flitting between past and present, the horrific details and the larger issues, Pahor remarks that these camps are ``the outpost of a perished land that extends into infinity.'' He describes the creeping horror of seemingly certain death with the skill of a Poe, yet shares with Hawthorne a brooding sense of survivor's guilt and a self-consciousness about memory, history, and his impossible literary task. The narrator's experiences have gutted his belief in man and God, yet he infuses each step of his painful tour with the religiosity of a pilgrim at a shrine. Most sacred to him is the memory of several medical colleagues and patients who resisted the degradations of hunger, brutality, and disease by various acts of quiet defiance. His own moments of heroism do not alter his feelings of guilt and self-doubt: ``I am alive, and that fact makes my best thoughts insincere, my best feelings impure.'' Pahor does not tell us anything about his life before or after the war, but his narrow focus is justified by this powerful record of the defining years of his life. In an intensely private voice, this ghostly pilgrim succeeds in making readers his confidantes and taking them with him to the place where he lost most of his comrades and much of himself.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-171958-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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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