A fascinating, well-researched story whose telling glimmers rather than glistens.
The sad, instructive saga of a boy hanged in 1892 for a double homicide he committed at age 15.
Brumberg (The Body Project, 1997, etc.) has sunk her spade into a mother lode of information about the alarming case of Charles Miller, an almost archetypal orphan born in 1874 in New York City to a mother who died of consumption when he was five and an alcoholic father who committed suicide. Charley and his three siblings entered the New York Orphan Asylum, where he suffered the humiliation of chronic bedwetting, a condition that did not endear him to the families who took him in. He bounced from one abusive situation to another until he ran off to hop trains. Adopting the moniker “Kansas Charley” (he’d lived briefly in the Cyclone State), the boy learned firsthand the roughness of the road when he was gang-raped by some older men. Later, in Wyoming, he ran into two better-off young men, Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh, heading west for fun and adventure. They had some kind of falling-out (over alcohol? sex? class conflict?), and one morning while the other two were sleeping, Charley shot and hurriedly robbed them both. Later, penitent, he surrendered in Kansas and was returned to Cheyenne, where he endured a long incarceration (twice escaping), a sensational trial, failed appeals, brief celebrity (his jailers gave the press virtually free access, and he penned his own accounts, sometimes in pathetic verse), and death by hanging before 60 witnesses. Brumberg (Women’s Studies/Cornell) appends a chapter containing familiar arguments against executing juveniles, including some cautionary words about such contemporary incidents as the Columbine shootings and the DC sniper attacks. Authorial clichés—twice the case reminds her of a hot potato—and an overall lack of craft diminish the narrative’s power.
A fascinating, well-researched story whose telling glimmers rather than glistens.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03228-X
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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