A thoughtful, witty, and evocative recollection of a life and the convictions that energized it.
Youthful, left-wing idealism subsides into pragmatic careerism before returning in unexpected ways in this memoir.
At the start of this book, Schlack, the founder of market-research firm C Space, thinks back to growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in suburban Montreal and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1960s. To her, it was an idyllic time despite the political and countercultural chaos around her. She recalls vacations at her family’s Quebec lake house, long evenings shooting the breeze with friends about possible UFO sightings, and youthful romance at a progressive summer camp. In high school and college, she got caught up in the anti-war movement, and she “went from flower child to anti-imperialist to ambivalent Maoist a few years later,” she says. She also wrestled with radical feminist stances on makeup, shaving, and traditional marriage. The author carried her political commitments into the 1970s and ’80s when, married with kids, she worked at factories while trying to sway workers to her militant leftism—an effort that fizzled in the Reagan era. The narrative then skips ahead to the 2000s and Schlack’s career in tech startups and marketing—a milieu of moral ambiguity and hope. She felt heartened by the Occupy movement, appalled by Donald Trump, and conflicted over her role in a capitalist society that might be “ready to sacrifice the planet and the lives of younger generations to satisfy…limitless greed.” Schlack recounts her ideological journey with humor and nuance throughout this sometimes-wry, sometimes-lyrical memoir. She riffs on what she sees as foibles of progressive dogma as well as absurdities of corporate culture, including a darkly hilarious incident in which a con woman almost financially destroyed the company where she worked. Schlack’s graceful prose balances cleareyed reflection with luminous passages that celebrate past passions, such as this one about the aforementioned summer camp: “As I try to summon up how I felt being there, what gets revived is the shocking carnality of my first French kiss, the energy stoked by being part of a group and feeling myself to be a pulsing cell in a larger organism.”
A thoughtful, witty, and evocative recollection of a life and the convictions that energized it.Pub Date: May 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947548-51-0
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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