Better read as an earnest account of an adult maintaining ties with her family of origin than as a story of life after...
From Maryland to Nigeria, a woman tries to make sense of her loss of faith.
Wilbanks, a winner of the Pushcart Prize, grew up in an insular, working-class, Pentecostal home. Her sex education came from weekly mailings her parents received from Focus on the Family, and her pastor taught that signs of Jesus’ return were everywhere. By the time Wilbanks reached adolescence, she was uncertain about her faith. On Nov. 5, 1995, she declared, to God and to a scrap of paper she then shoved in her pocket, “Jessica Wilbanks is no longer a Christian.” That ritual reversal of the datable conversions so prized by evangelical Christians occurs about a quarter through the book; the rest of the memoir is devoted to the author’s forging of a new life. She experimented with alcohol and drugs and attended Hampshire College and then the University of Houston, all the while trying to maintain relationships with her parents and brothers. While in graduate school, Wilbanks became interested in the extent to which Pentecostalism had roots in West Africa. She received a grant and traveled to Nigeria to “immerse myself in the faith I had left as a child” and study “the history of Pentecostal Christianity.” After the trip, which included a near-fatal car wreck, she quit smoking, took up running, continued to try to maintain a good relationship with her family, got married, and had a child. The memoir ends with a lovely scene of Wilbanks, her son, and her mother attending a candlelit Christmas Eve service. However, the author never compellingly establishes the stakes of her trip to Africa, and her tendency to end chapters with lines that reach too hard for meaning—e.g., “those women’s eyes rested on mine, and I felt forgiven”—eventually grows tiresome.
Better read as an earnest account of an adult maintaining ties with her family of origin than as a story of life after religion.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-9223-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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