The adventure and peril of everyday living captured in language that's light, beautiful, and razor-sharp.
Lyrical, gripping tale of the year Cohen's life went to hell.
One minute she was living an idyll, lazing through her days as a rural-upstate New York reporter and nights in a secluded farmhouse with a loving husband and infant daughter; the next, her Alzheimer's-afflicted father had moved in, her husband had moved across the country to shack up with an 18-year-old, and winter buried the house in snow. Cohen and her youthful husband had been a Manhattan couple with an active social life. After the move to Beartown Road and Dad's appearance, her city sophistication was entirely irrelevant in the endless battle to keep her father and daughter fed, dry, and safe, to get through the winter without freezing to death (apparently a surprisingly easy thing to do in a civilized North American town), neglecting her family, or losing her job. Cohen takes what could be a self-indulgent sob story and turns it into the stuff of high adventure. When she lies to her father about the eldercare group he attends, telling him he is the group's teacher, the reader prays the fiction will hold so that she can go to work secure in the knowledge that he won’t accidentally burn the house down while smoking unattended. When neighbors plow her driveway after big snowfalls, we’re swept with gratitude for the author’s sake. Cohen frames the whole of her messy, absorbing year in the framework of how we learn and forget. As her daughter gains words, her father loses them. As her daughter acquires motor skills, her father stumbles. As she describes the waxing of her daughter's personality and the waning of her father's, the fact he cannot remember her name or learn her daughter's, Cohen manages never to resort to sentimentality.
The adventure and peril of everyday living captured in language that's light, beautiful, and razor-sharp.Pub Date: April 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50727-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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