Readers won’t accuse the author of sugarcoating her experiences, and if the narrative sometimes seems to bog down in...
In 2012, sick of her job and uncertain about her marriage, Dinan (Life on Fire: A Step-By-Step Guide to Living Your Dreams, 2013, etc.) quit work and persuaded her reluctant husband to sell their house and other belongings and take off for more than two years to travel around the world.
Along with them went the envelope of the title, which contained $1,000 handed to them by Dinan’s former boss, with the instruction that the money was to be given away during the trip. She attached three provisos: “Don’t over think it”; “Share your experiences (…if you want to)”; and “Don’t feel pressured to give it all away.” The first goal proved easier said than done; the second the author accomplishes in this book. At first waffling about whether she would seem condescending or culturally insensitive, she gradually began to feel comfortable with distributing the cash to a school where they volunteered in Ecuador, a rickshaw driver in India, a dog shelter, a Nepalese holy woman, and the owners of a turtle sanctuary in Bali. If the yellow envelope provides one strand unifying the book, Dinan’s marital troubles form the other. Readers looking for insight into the locales through which the author traveled instead receive sometimes-repetitive descriptions of quarrels in which the author blames her husband for her unhappiness and he refuses to take the blame. The two separated temporarily, with the author climbing “into a rickshaw with two women I’d never met before to drive the length of India on some of the world’s deadliest roads.” Overall, Dinan narrates a memorable adventure even if she spends a good deal of time brooding about her marriage.
Readers won’t accuse the author of sugarcoating her experiences, and if the narrative sometimes seems to bog down in self-analysis, it’s likely an accurate account of her interior life on the road.Pub Date: April 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3538-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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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