Still, this opens a window into the world of autism to provide an unforgettable view.
Revealing first-person account of what it is like to live with Asperger syndrome.
Although Prince-Hughes eventually managed to earn a Ph.D. despite her socially crippling disorder (a form of autism), she had a disastrous early life. She dropped out of high school and lived on the street, later earning her living as an exotic dancer. She attributes the turnaround in her life to the gorillas at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Unable to communicate or connect in any meaningful way with humans, the author began spending hours at the zoo silently watching a family of gorillas, closely observing their ways and their relationships with each other. She developed deep empathy with these primates, referred to here as “gorilla people” because in her view they fulfill all the criteria for personhood, serving as models of gentle care, protectiveness, acceptance, and love. Human emotions, long inexplicable to Prince-Hughes, became more understandable; she learned to relax in social situations and gradually had more success in human encounters. After a while she was hired by the zoo and resumed her education, eventually earning a doctorate in interdisciplinary anthropology. The author’s affinity with gorillas was great, and she came to see herself as a bridge between gorilla people and human people as well as between autistic people and normal people. By the end of her memoir, she has formed a loving relationship with another woman and together they are raising a son. Lest the reader assume that her Asperger syndrome has been vanquished, Prince-Hughes includes an epilogue detailing the huge difficulties that it still presents in her daily life. In a generally excellent debut, some of the author’s claims strain credulity: not all readers will believe that both she and her son recall the experience of being born, that she can understand the speech of a bonobo chimp, or that the gorilla Koko has recognized her as a fellow gorilla.
Still, this opens a window into the world of autism to provide an unforgettable view.Pub Date: March 9, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5058-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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