A captivating, psychedelically charged coming-of-age memoir.
A dazzling debut memoir from artist and designer Rush.
Growing up in a strict Roman Catholic family in New Jersey, the author felt both trapped and adrift as a child, a feeling exacerbated by his neglectful mother and alcoholic father, who was “a dark planet, exerting only vague astrological influence on his offspring.” Introduced to drugs, especially LSD, early on by his loving hippie sister, Donna, Rush continued to chafe under his suburban adolescence before finally setting out on a remarkable journey into the counterculture and across America, from his hometown to the wilderness of the Southwest. By the age of 13, he writes, “I took LSD as often as possible. Taking acid was like entering a painting of a storybook—a glowing dream world, lush and lovely. I felt no conflict between the real and the unreal. It was so easy to slip in between.” In sparkling, lucid prose that perfectly captures the joy, depression, anger, and wonder that characterized his adventures, the author recounts the seemingly endless hills and valleys of his unique tale. Among others, these experiences included countless days getting stoned in his parents’ basement, avoiding his dysfunctional parents; a stint in boarding school, where he became the primary drug dealer on campus; time living with Donna and a group of her friends on a drug compound in rural Arizona; enduring a shocking act of violence; and some weeks living a feral life in caves scattered around the deserts of the West. Along the way, while struggling with significant substance abuse (“sometimes I’d shoot up with…customers who craved a speechless high, who wanted to grow dim with me, become sputtering candles in the dark”) and grappling with his sexuality, Rush continued to draw, an artistic spark that took years to ignite into a career. He also suffered a near overdose. Though the narrative ends on a slight uptick, the author refreshingly avoids tying his story up with a pretty bow, and readers will wish for more from this talented writer.
A captivating, psychedelically charged coming-of-age memoir.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-29441-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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