An enjoyable, clever book about self-determination.
An artist reflects on fateful events during his youth in postwar Europe as he seeks meaning and peace in his life in this memoir.
Following a short preface, Tomicic (Die Autobahn, 2018) tells of walking with his 4-year-old daughter in a city park in an unspecified year. She remarked on the sheer volume of flowers in the grass by the side of a road. However, he needed her to point out the tiny flora, which he wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. He says that this incident reminded him of his own childhood in Europe, just after World War II. Many residents of his unnamed city weren’t coping well, he says: “It was a very upsetting situation to look at people, lying in the street, positioned like soldiers in the army and waiting for the enemy to react.” There were food lines and a general lack of resources, but he was still determined to go to art school. He was encouraged by the approval of an artist neighbor and a gift of a sketchbook from his uncle. Later, he found art college to be quite strict; if students were late once, or forgot their art supplies, they could be expelled. Nevertheless, he was thrilled to pursue his ambition. Tomicic offers readers a slim but purposeful memoir that encourages readers not only to live their dream, but also to find out what’s truly meaningful in life. Some may find that the titular metaphor of the rose in the road is a bit hard to grasp, but the author’s tales beautifully illustrate his points about the significance of key life events. For example, he tells of how one day, to his horror, he realized that he didn’t have a pencil for an art class. Knowing that this could mean the end of his education, he begged a fellow student to loan him one—and what happened next decided the future course of the author’s career. Throughout this remembrance, Tomicic’s prose is spare and elegant. As he chronicles his time as a hopeful young person in a city reduced to rubble, he wisely chooses to highlight insight over sentimentality.
An enjoyable, clever book about self-determination.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948282-55-0
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Yorkshire Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2018
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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