Though firsthand, a minor addition to the literature surrounding the Manson cult.
A one-time member of the Manson family delivers a dutiful account of her part in that history of mayhem.
“I had buried my history so well I’d almost forgotten that once I was someone else,” writes Lake—called, in Mansonese, “Snake.” Rattled out of decades of small-f family life, churchgoing, and good deeds—she testified against Manson and her fellow cultists during the notorious Sharon Tate murder trials and was released to a foster family as a minor, thus avoiding imprisonment—by the news that a corpse dog might have located yet more bodies in the haunt of the Manson family, she turns in a memoir that is courageous in spirit but long on self-justification: if society didn’t make her run off and join the cult, then her hippie parents, erstwhile members of the decidedly peaceful Hog Farm commune, certainly didn’t help with their endless permissiveness. The Stockholm syndrome is well in play as Lake describes Manson’s deft use of psychological tricks—some of them picked up by doing time with pimps on Terminal Island—to undermine the egos of his young followers, especially girls. “The first was to use fear and intimidation, but that didn’t always work,” she writes, adding, “the final and most important was making the girl feel fully loved.” Lake goes on to reveal that in her case, as the youngest member of the family, fear was the strongest operative factor, with Manson often threatening her. The author’s portraits of figures such as Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houten, and Susan Atkins will be of interest to Manson completists, although the main outlines are already well-known. Likewise, the author’s account of a bewildered, manipulated Dennis Wilson, of Beach Boys fame, makes it clear that Brian wasn’t the only brother to have borne mental wounds from childhood abuse—again, no real news there.
Though firsthand, a minor addition to the literature surrounding the Manson cult.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-269557-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
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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