Dutiful but dim. (b&w photographs throughout)
A new voice sings an earnest but commonplace paean to her mother, whose grit and imagination helped her three young children survive nearly four years of imprisonment during the Japanese occupation of Java in WWII.
Kelly, whose parents were Dutch, was only four years old when the Japanese invaded Java and began rounding up able-bodied men, her father among them, to build the Burma Road and forcing women and children into squalid camps. After an introduction that is a museum of clichés—her experiences, Kelly says, were like a “horrendous nightmare”—she offers a snapshot of the family in 1946: The war is over, and they have arrived back in Holland virtually penniless but with one dear possession they managed to retain—a painting of a flamboya tree. She then returns to 1942 and her Javanese life before the invasion. Her father inherited his own father’s spice company, and the family enjoyed the easy quasi-colonial life of private swimming clubs, exotic food, and cheap servants. Throughout, Kelly seems blithely unaware of the moral algebra of her situation. Was the Japanese displacement of the Dutch so much different from the Dutch displacement of the Javanese? Kelly sees few if any connections. Instead, she notes without irony, “Our wonderful servants stood ever ready with their kindly faces to indulge our whims.” Soon enough, her father is taken away and the family is arrested and confined to a round of near-starvation, endless roll calls in intense heat, physical abuse by guards, and odious physical labor. Kelly recalls the children’s terrorizing by a guard’s fierce pet monkey, brutal fights among the prisoners, and a Christmas chorus of “Silent Night.” Eventually, the family returns to Holland and an oddly cold grandmother who cannot understand why they didn’t just escape. Kelly still has the painting of the tree.
Dutiful but dim. (b&w photographs throughout)Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50621-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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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