Earnest, often heartbreaking, but somehow still unsatisfying.
Novelist Jasper explores the roots and psyche of an African-American family.
As he approached his 30th year, the author (Seeking Salamanca Mitchell, 2004, etc.) had his view of fatherhood irrevocably challenged when his girlfriend became pregnant. He turned to his family’s difficult patriarch, octogenarian Jesse Langley Sr., for insights. What made Granddaddy Jesse so emotionally diffident and cold, despite the fact that he was an adequate husband, father and grandfather for 60 years? Jasper’s grandfather died before Jasper could visit Greenville, N.C., the place where Jesse grew up, lost his parents and gave himself the name the Lone Ranger. The author was left to pry answers from his immediate family. Grandma Sally recalled meeting Jesse, when she was 19, in the Pentagon lunchroom; it was 1940, and they had both moved out of the South to find work in D.C. For all of their married life they lived on Childress Street in the capital. Jasper’s mother Angela, firstborn of three children, held up the example of her father as a responsible provider to her own husband, Melvin, who eventually caved under the pressure and left. (Ironically, Melvin later started another family and stuck with it.) Jasper visited innumerable aunts, uncles and cousins, extracting their stories of survival throughout the tumultuous political decades from the civil-rights movement through the sexual revolution and into the present. He found that few of Jesse’s descendants wanted to talk about the emotional toll that being orphaned and black took on him. In colloquial, heavy-handed prose, Jasper veers capriciously from personal history into muddled family chronology, offering plenty of moral slogans and relationship lessons for his contemporaries.
Earnest, often heartbreaking, but somehow still unsatisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-7679-1679-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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