Surviving these experiences and breaking free of her golem nature is what drives the second half of the book, along with the...
A former Village Voice reporter known for her writing on gay and lesbian issues in the 1980s and ’90s holds nothing back in describing her disturbing childhood, relationships and sex life, writing career and painful disability.
Minkowitz’s first memoir, Ferocious Romance (1998), won the Lambda Literary Award. Here, the author employs the same brutal introspection and clever humor, but this book is much more personal and sexually explicit in content. Early on, the author establishes the trope that she is her mother’s golem, an artificial person brought to life through Jewish mysticism to serve its creator. She uses this form of magical realism to explain her disconnected relationship to her body, her mother’s power over her and her willingness to be abused, but she also allows it to justify actions of her own that could otherwise be perceived as selfish or mean. As a child, Minkowitz was hit by her father and forced to tell her mother she looked sexy dancing naked, among other inappropriate exchanges. Obsessed with sex, lying and dying, her mother was a philosophy professor who dominated each of the nearly dozen homes in which the family lived while the author was growing up. Minkowitz escaped to attend Yale before writing for the Voice, where she enjoyed making a difference as a journalist and activist. In her mid-30s, life started unraveling. Relationships with her therapist, best friend and sister crashed and burned. She started seeing a married mother of two, watched her own mother die slowly and experienced the sudden onset of repetitive strain injury, a musculoskeletal condition that prevented her from writing (she now uses voice dictation software) and performing basic domestic tasks.
Surviving these experiences and breaking free of her golem nature is what drives the second half of the book, along with the defiant, playful energy Minkowitz brings to writing about her dark and difficult past. Intelligent but not for the prudish or fainthearted.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-936833-60-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Magnus Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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