Few readers will fully agree with what Church represented, but all will find his story instructive and masterfully told.
Detailed biography of a less-than-perfect liberal church leader.
Son of famed U.S. Senator Frank Church, Forrest Church emerged from the heady 1960s as a national leader of the Unitarian Universalist Association and a noted but controversial spokesman for what former Newsday book critic Cryer calls “liberal religion.” The author, who conducted numerous personal interviews with Church and those close to him, provides a truly comprehensive, warts-and-all examination of the man’s life. Spending much of his late-’60s college career at Stanford as a rather stereotypically underachieving pothead, Church rebounded from this destructive path only to be faced with the grand question of his times: how to avoid the draft. His chosen answer was to enter seminary, and despite less-than-sincere reasons for doing so, he ended up as a devoted scholar of religion. Drawn eventually into work as a clergy member of the UUA, he spent his entire career at the denomination’s flagship church in New York City, All Souls. While expanding his church and its mission and gaining a national audience through numerous books, Church also brought about the destruction of his marriage and almost of his own career through infidelity. Cryer, a longtime member of All Souls, dispassionately chronicles his subject’s often-chaotic life—that of an overachieving, workaholic, alcoholic, ne’er-do-well-turned-denominational doyen. Church’s story ends with his death from cancer in 2009, covered poignantly by the author. Cryer’s prose is approachable, educational and engaging, and readers will relive the upheaval of Vietnam, the advent of AIDS, the religious controversies of the ’80s, and even 9/11.
Few readers will fully agree with what Church represented, but all will find his story instructive and masterfully told.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59943-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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