Readers searching for full and consistent contrition may be uncomfortable, but those seeking a greater understanding of...
The Tony Award–winning playwright and bestselling author excavates the violent truths of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse in a painful quest for healing.
Told from the perspective of the father who committed countless wrongs against his child, Ensler’s (In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection, 2013, etc.) latest is a chilling portrait from the broken mirror of his memories; only in the final pages will readers find the narrator’s candid acceptance of responsibility for this sadistic history. Fully amplifying her father’s warped perceptions, the author provides an exacting, revealing glimpse into the psychology of gaslighting from the view of a perpetrator. Ensler effectively unearths tragic betrayals of trust and the multiple terrors survived by her younger self. Her father’s twisted attention and attempted sabotages persisted as he notes the criticisms he planted to undercut his daughter’s growth and independence at every turn. Paternal contempt followed the author through high school and beyond, and she captures it all in a fevered account that traces periods of resistance, rebellion, self-destruction, creativity, and sobriety in the years she spent seeking to break from the restrictions cast by a father obsessed with violating her agency. Ensler’s father is certain to frustrate readers looking for a more concrete sense of justice, and the graphic catalogue of sexual abuses and physical violence will challenge most readers and trigger some. Still, this is a potent, necessary narrative of healing, and the author succeeds in her “attempt to endow my father with the will and the words to cross the border, and speak the language, of apology so that I can finally be free.” This imagined voice is as intimate as it is alarming, and Ensler also taps into a broader struggle, seeking to hold all perpetrators of abuse accountable for their actions.
Readers searching for full and consistent contrition may be uncomfortable, but those seeking a greater understanding of psychological manipulation will appreciate this powerful examination.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-438-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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