Genuinely sentimental and stimulating on a generation’s family values.
Essays on the stages of his life—boyhood in Vienna, the deracination of flight from Nazism, the trials of assimilation in New York—from one of the renowned practitioners of the form.
Morton’s first book in 15 years puts readers in touch, at first, with Fritz Mandelbaum, Morton as a boy in his native Vienna in 1936. He is in a dingily ornate movie house gaping in awe at the incomparable boulevardier onscreen, the Austrian émigré Fritz Austerlitz, his personal hero and role model, better known in America as Fred Astaire. Soon, his other role model, an often austere father whose disciplinarian veneer almost on a daily basis reveals a heart of gold, will shepherd the family, via a London sojourn of several years, to New York in the manner of countless Jewish families during the rise of Hitler. Ensconced in upper Manhattan’s Washington Heights, known locally as the “Fourth Reich” due to its concentration of refugees from the Third, the family name becomes Morton the day his father realizes that no Mandelbaum will get the union job he desperately needs. Morton’s recollections evoke a depth of feeling in which amazement and poignancy constantly coexist, so that even the terrifying flight from Austria, through checkpoints where one’s entire future lies beneath the looming rubber stamp of an official whose boredom could at any moment unleash a brutal whim, becomes simultaneously a marvelous adventure. As an apprentice in a New York bakery, Mortron’s drive to assimilate supersedes almost everything else except his ongoing Astaire worship. Mastering English—the precise accent, the slang, the profanity—becomes crucial. “I have spent ninety cents of my first [bakery] earnings on a dictionary,” Morton recalls. It’s “a used one but sizeable,” and he hopes that “expanding my vocabulary might diminish my accent somehow, perhaps by diluting it among a greater number of words.”
Genuinely sentimental and stimulating on a generation’s family values.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2539-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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