A warm and honest memoir.
A sometimes-abrasive radio and TV personality’s unexpectedly touching memoir about “the best summer of [his] life.”
In the summer of 1974, 12-year-old Benza was “struggling with pimples and puberty” in a household dominated by his macho Sicilian father, Al. Then Benza’s uncle sent his 10-year-old boy, Gino—who he feared had the same gay tendencies as an older son—to live with his brother's family on Long Island. Al told Benza that their job that summer was to introduce the "brain damaged" Gino to fishing, sports, and girls. From the outset, the author realized he was fighting an uphill battle. Gino had never so much as stuck a toe in ocean water. Worse still, he ignored the women in Al’s Playboy magazines, sang the lyrics to tear-jerker pop ballads and Broadway musical songs, and knew more about Marilyn Monroe than he did about her baseball hero husband, Joe DiMaggio. And when Gino played kickball with Benza and the neighborhood boys, he demonstrated that he was as unable to catch or throw as he was to “field a grounder [even] if his life depended on it.” But the more the author and his family got to know the apparently hapless Gino, the more they accepted him for the sensitive, intelligent boy he was. He even won over Benza’s hypermasculine father, who not only protected the boy from the homophobia of neighborhood bullies, but also told him to stop taking the many pills his doctor father had prescribed for his “condition.” Benza’s depiction of how he, his father, and his cousin—who went home “beam[ing] with quiet confidence, resolve and inner freedom”—change is what is most satisfying about this book. That one family could make a difference in the life of a misunderstood boy and in turn be transformed by interactions with him is an uplifting message about the true nature of love.
A warm and honest memoir.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3878-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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