A coming-of-age drama captured through poetic prose and convincing honesty.
A modeling industry trailblazer and former Olympic swimmer recounts her troubled girlhood.
In her debut, Legler passionately relives her years in Europe and stateside. She was born to expatriate American parents who, despite a disintegrating marriage, struggled to raise her and her siblings. Restless and lonely, the uncommonly tall girl found solace and purpose in swimming. She quickly developed great skill and dexterity, which positioned her for greatness as her strength and determination grew with regular training sessions. The author swam competitively in her early teens as she navigated simmering hormones, smitten boys, and the abusive, predatory physician treating her scoliosis. Legler’s lyrically descriptive prose glides across childhood anecdotes of her first swimming attempt as well as awkward sexual interludes as she strained to discover her identity and a place of her own among her classmates. She shows the precarious balancing act that ensued between her rigorous training sessions at the pool and the soft-core rebellion of teenage life and the struggle to fit in: “I have a swim meet the next day but I’ll get drunk anyway so that I can crawl on the couch with the rest of them. And I do. And it feels good. And I am beautiful.” The author also began to embrace the first sparks of attraction to other girls while exploring her desires with men. Then she shifted her focus to qualifying for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. She intricately describes every nuance of the competitive experience alongside her personal self-discovery and experimentation with sex, alcohol, and procuring drugs for her fellow teammates. Legler decorates each of her adventures with urgency and lively, only occasionally strained poetic expression. Readers familiar with the author know she has grown past the dark days described in this memoir to become a unique fashion model, social justice activist, and successful entrepreneur. This focused attention on her youthful turmoil represents a significant need for blissful catharsis.
A coming-of-age drama captured through poetic prose and convincing honesty.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3575-0
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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