A breezy, well-intentioned memoir for Osbourne fans.
The TV personality and fashion designer addresses different aspects of her life through a series of letters.
Calling the writing of her new book “one of the most intense forms of therapy I have ever experienced,” Osbourne (Fierce, 2009), in her latest, covers a wide array of personal opinion and history. Headstrong and unabashed, the author displays the same steely resolve in her writing, and she notes that letters were, during a particularly dark time, the only communication she’d had with family and friends. Osbourne opens with a missive to her inner filter, the one that has failed and seemingly sabotaged her from Day 1. She then moves through the pains of being a celebrity’s kid and thoughtful appreciations of friends, her mother, Sharon, overprotective father, Ozzy, and brother, Jack. An especially tender section on Osbourne’s long, fond friendship with Joan Rivers is nicely juxtaposed with memories of Ozzfest (her “sleepaway camp”) and harrowing chapters on bullying and a full disclosure on how she lives with Lyme disease. The author regrets the “innocent” decision to participate in MTV’s The Osbournes, which thrust the author “completely unprepared” into the celebrity spotlight only to be subjected to the cruel scrutiny of social media. Osbourne is mostly successful in balancing her infrequent triumphs and stumbling blocks like drug addiction and weight and self-esteem issues, which should prove empowering for younger readers. Eventually, despite a cautionary warning, nonfans may tire of the barrage of defensive expletives, which may seem necessary for an Osbourne book but become tedious. Still, readers who adore the unadulterated Osbourne will devour her amusing and sometimes-scandalous anecdotes and applicable advice on life, fashion, and self-acceptance. “I am living proof that with the right intentions, hard work, passion, and love for what you do, nothing can stop you,” she writes.
A breezy, well-intentioned memoir for Osbourne fans.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-17656-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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