A straightforwardly told chronicle that will appeal to readers with an interest in genealogy.
Novelist-playwright Arsenault (The Company Way, 2012, etc.), drawing on his own family’s background, describes an Italian wife’s reluctant immigration to New England in the 1920s and the drama that ensues.
This novel details the bittersweet immigrant experiences of a working-class Italian family in the rough-edged New Hampshire hamlet of Berlin, which include quite a multitude of sorrows. Assunta, a young, Italian wife and mother, is at the heart of the ensemble family saga, and she proves herself to be a born survivor—and nobody’s fool. It’s 1920 when she’s summoned to come to Ellis Island by her husband Camillo, who’s been forging a career in America for the last several years as a stonemason. But Camillo has also been having a long-standing affair with his French housekeeper, and Assunta soon realizes that she—and her children—don’t really know him very well at all. But, true to her vows, she takes on a motherly role in a land that’s not only full of opportunity, but also pain and disappointment. The first half covers Assunta’s initial months in America; the rest spans Prohibition, the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression, the rise of Axis-Italian fascism, and America’s entry into World War II—yet the book never feels rushed or overcrowded. It also addresses how all of these historical events affect and buffet the town of Berlin in general and the heroine’s growing (yet mortal) family in particular. Arsenault resists the temptation to make the characters’ emotions melodramatic, and he also eschews sepia-toned sentimentality. Neither does he try to hammer this family saga into a statement about what America means. The results may lack poetry and vigorous histrionics, but the unhurried, direct prose does have an appealing, newspaperlike verisimilitude.
A straightforwardly told chronicle that will appeal to readers with an interest in genealogy.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5390-8226-2
Page Count: 428
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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