An endearing snapshot of a wartime marriage unlikely to appeal to a wide readership.
A daughter lovingly reconstructs her parents’ lives based on the letters they exchanged while separated during World War II.
Irma and Louis Vajda had similar childhood experiences growing up in an insular enclave of Eastern European families in Cleveland. Both Hungarian—Irma was born in the U.S. to immigrant parents, and Louis arrived from Hungary in 1921 at the age of 7—they faced discrimination whenever they ventured beyond their neighborhoods. They met in 1938 at a dance and married two years later during a tumultuous time in American history, haunted by both the Depression and the specter of world war. Louis was drafted into the Navy in 1943 as an apprentice seaman and served aboard the USS Bull, an assignment that often proved terribly dangerous. Between 1943 and 1945, Louis and Irma exchanged more than 500 letters, the correspondence a remarkably touching “lifeline between husband and wife.” Budden (The Un-Common Raven: One Smart Bird, 2013, etc.)—the daughter of Louis and Irma—weaves a short history of her parents’ marriage based on those letters, some reproduced in the book. Those two years of separation caused great anxiety for both, and the tender epistles provided much-needed reassurance, especially for Irma, who writes: “I want so to hear from you. Please don’t give me any excuses. That isn’t what I want! Don’t say there isn’t anything to write about. There is too! Even if you just say things like ‘I got up from my chair and then sat down again.’ ” The author skillfully gives a peek at her parents’ lives and at those of immigrants in the U.S. during a period of unrest and scarcity. A thoughtful account of the ways in which the war transformed the place of women in society—essentially compelled to join the workforce in the absence of their husbands—emerges as well. The letters often dwell on quotidian matters like bills, and the story as a whole is very personal, accompanied by family photographs. As a result, Budden’s book will likely be most appreciated by those in her sphere of family and friends.
An endearing snapshot of a wartime marriage unlikely to appeal to a wide readership.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-55760-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Red Rock Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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