An overly sentimental book. Child-free readers—and levelheaded parents in need of a break—should take a pass.
A mother's angst-filled yet romanticized experience of her children's growth.
Near the beginning of her latest book, Real Simple “Modern Manners” columnist and parenting blogger Newman (Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, 2005) notes how there are "things you thought would be fun with kids but secretly aren’t”—e.g., “making biscuits, watching the Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies, ice-skating”—and “how they all end up in tears and pooping." Unfortunately, the author frequently overwhelms readers with cooing worship of her young children, and her focus on and adoration of them seem to exist in a bubble in which the nuclear family rarely comes into contact with outsiders. (She has no inclination for mentioning her husband, who barely registers in the narrative.) Newman is clearly besotted with her daughter, but readers may become frustrated with such observations as, "her dark-lashed peach of a face the dearest thing I've ever had the good sense to notice.” The author’s voice is deliberate and soft, and the very short chapters catalog her insecurities and show that she makes little time for herself. Most scenes are interior, centered on meals and the children’s precocious conversations. Yet Newman is self-aware, and she admits she is filled with "dotty, nearly heartbroken devotion and, also, something like despair.” But there is no relatable or humorous counterweight to her "apocalyptic, death-and-mayhem catalog of possibilities that arrive[s] daily in the in-box of [her] brain.” Even as her children move into their preteen years, she continues to romantically pine for their early-childhood wonder. "I drive everybody crazy with my nostalgia and happiness,” she writes. “I am bittersweet personified."
An overly sentimental book. Child-free readers—and levelheaded parents in need of a break—should take a pass.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-33750-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2016
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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