A sad and curious memoir that will make others with unhappy childhoods know they’re not alone.
Padowicz (A Scandal in Venice, 2013, etc.) adds the memoir of his years as a refugee in the United States to his earlier works about his and his mother’s escape from Poland during World War II.
The author recounts one of the most difficult periods in any life: getting through school. Doomed from the beginning, he began in a French school in Warsaw, followed by a Brazilian school before coming to New York. Padowicz couldn’t speak the language of any school he attended, and he possessed only rudimentary English when he started fourth grade at boarding school in 1942. With only the headmaster’s wife to tutor him, he slowly picked up the language, but his difficulty focusing and finishing reading assignments would be lifelong challenges. Only his writing and storytelling talent got him through, as his popular Kip and Amanda books now attest. Padowicz speaks kindly of his mother and her admonitions to succeed and, above all, tell no one that he was Jewish. His best times and spurts of normalcy were holidays staying with his aunt and uncle, the caricaturist, Arthur Szyk, in New Canaan, Connecticut. Eventually, Padowicz’s mother married a Frenchman, Pierre, and they moved to Montreal. A normal family life was not to be, and his mother’s visits, now fewer and further between, invariably included suggestions, even bribes, that he get a nose job. It was not until college that he finally discovered his only weapon was a threat to join a temple. The author’s accounts of his school days are fairly predictable, and his family life was nearly nonexistent. His one relationship, in the end, was long and unsatisfactory. He has dealt with his mother as most neglected children do, always loving and hoping, ever disappointed.
A sad and curious memoir that will make others with unhappy childhoods know they’re not alone.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-89733-919-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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