Occasionally repetitious; best for history trivia buffs and Kuehn's family members.
Debut author Kuehn collaborates with debut co-author Ruggeri to pen a tribute to his paternal grandparents in this look back at Wisconsin farm life during the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
Driven by a desire to better understand his grandparents, Carl August Kuehn and Hulda Theresa Bandt Kuehn, Kuehn returned to Ripon, Wisconsin, in a quest for information about the Eastern European immigrants who settled as farmers in the northern part of the state. The work traces scant documented family land transactions, adding general historical data about the area as well as Kuehn’s personal recollections of the two decades spent visiting his grandparents on their farm. The result is this celebration of the “dignified, quiet, and unassuming lives” led by the simple, hardworking folk who populated rural Wisconsin. Both Grandpa Charly and Grandma Hulda were first-generation offspring of Prussian immigrants who had separately arrived midcentury in Princeton, Wisconsin. Charlie married Hulda in 1894 when he was 24 years old, she only 16. They lived with Hulda’s parents until the spring of 1895, when they rented a house in Metomen, where Charly helped work his father’s farm. In 1907, Charly purchased his own farm in Ripon, remaining there until his death in 1956. Much of this first-person narrative, written in Kuehn’s voice, is culled from reference books and is therefore not specific to Kuehn’s family. The authors enhance what are sometimes rather dry historical and geographical details with long passages that imagine what Charly might have been thinking: “Sitting on the porch stoop before going to bed, I took in my surroundings. Short loud trills of gray tree frogs filled the air. The warm summer breeze had cleared the sky and all the stars were out looking down upon us.” The text is overloaded with recent family genealogy, which becomes tedious, but it’s also sprinkled with some historical lifestyle gems; e.g., how to bake bread in a wood-stove oven and why women often wore black wedding dresses.
Occasionally repetitious; best for history trivia buffs and Kuehn's family members.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9992780-0-0
Page Count: 140
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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