An occasionally poignant but mostly dismal memoir of loss and its many manifestations.
A chronicle of the relationship between two sisters struggling to “solve the mystery of individuality and connection.”
Goldman (Early Leaving, 2008, etc.) begins in 1992, with the discovery of a “mass” in her breast. When she called her sister, Brenda, the next day, Brenda told her that she felt “calcifications” in her breast. Their biopsies occurred one day apart; the author’s diagnosis was benign, but her sister’s was malignant. For Goldman, the cancer encapsulated their respective images: she sweet and prim (like her mother), her sister tougher (like their father.) She explains that as the younger sibling, she followed her sister's lead; in turn, her sister was protective. Goldman then skips back to 1974, when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Two years later, her father suffered a recurrence of colon cancer. The stress of the situation contributed to a serious rift between the sisters, a breach of intimacy that they struggled to repair during the ensuing years. Goldman’s parents had played an important part in helping them maintain their close bond as sisters. With them gone, writes the author, she experienced a belated rebellion against her sister. In an unsuccessful attempt to repair their apparently broken relationship, the sisters even tried couples' therapy. After their mother's death, they reconciled for a while, but the cycle repeated itself. Although her sister's fatal illness brought them close again, Goldman was left bereft but determined to claim her independence.
An occasionally poignant but mostly dismal memoir of loss and its many manifestations.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-89587-583-9
Page Count: 228
Publisher: John F. Blair
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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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