A gut-wrenching memoir of love unexpectedly eviscerated.
In spare, poignant prose, New York Times assistant national news editor Canedy bares the human cost of the Iraq war.
An independent woman skeptical of marriage, the author found herself at age 33 falling in love with First Sgt. Charles King, “a gentle soul [whose] heart was as big as his biceps.” It was 1998, and Canedy, the daughter of a former drill sergeant, had never wanted to be a military wife who planned her career around her husband’s tours of duty. She was initially conflicted about her feelings for the physically imposing yet modest King, a commanding leader who was also a tender artist who drew portraits of angels. Canedy slowly succumbed to his charms, and by the time King left for Iraq in December 2005, she was five months pregnant and they were engaged. The sergeant had already begun writing a journal for his unborn son, Jordan, who was six months old when King was killed in Iraq, one month before he was to return to his family. Addressed to their son, Canedy’s narrative seeks to capture his father’s essence for him. It includes excerpts from King’s journal, which reveal the soul of a beautiful and decent man. “Always share your gifts with others,” he advises Jordan. “Laughter is great medicine for the soul,” and “sometimes you get lucky and catch a rainbow.” King put his military duty above family, refusing to take leave to attend his son’s birth. Taunted by a commanding officer, he knowingly participated in the recklessly unsafe final mission that killed him because he felt obligated to undergo the same risks as his soldiers. Canedy honestly describes her anger at his death; robbed of her future family life, she felt “agony, so raw that even breathing hurts.”
A gut-wrenching memoir of love unexpectedly eviscerated.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39579-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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