A searing, personal account of race and racism in mid-century America.
Powerful debut memoir relates what happened after the author’s white mother and black father split up.
Cross (Journalism/Columbia Univ.) knew a lot about race from a very young age. People frowned at little June’s hair, said she looked Chinese, said she had her daddy’s lips. Her parents separated in January 1954, when she was a baby. Identified as “white” on her birth certificate, she lived with her mother, Norma, in New York for a few years, but then her skin got darker, and she could no longer “pass.” Before June was old enough to enter school, Norma sent her to live in Atlantic City with a middle-class black couple, Aunt Peggy and Uncle Paul. Eventually, her mother married actor Larry Storch. June visited them in the summertime, but Norma always worried that her presence threatened Storch’s career. Meanwhile, Peggy loved her like a daughter, but they clashed as the ‘60s unfolded; the older woman had little patience for African-American radicalism and worried that June was limiting herself at Harvard by hanging out with other black students. The memoir follows Cross through college and beyond, into a successful career in journalism that included making an Emmy-winning documentary, also called Secret Daughter, about her childhood and her relationship with Norma. Here, she concludes that her mother “had done the right thing,” though she also knows that her childhood lefts its marks: “Trust eludes me. . . . I waited until middle age to marry. I never had children.” The kiddie voice employed in early chapters (“Paul’s God had a mommie called Virgin Mary”) is replaced by the middle of the book with a strong, even tone.
A searing, personal account of race and racism in mid-century America.Pub Date: May 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-88555-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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