Very much the work of a writer conscious of his role as a political man of letters. Much of what he finds interesting may...
A momentous year for Germany and the author, as detailed in a journal published more than two decades after the fact.
In 1990, nine years before he would win the Nobel Prize for literature, Grass (The Box: Tales from the Darkroom, 2010, etc.) experienced a year of such turmoil that he thought it might be worth documenting in a daily journal, even though, he writes at the outset, “I am not one of those people who love keeping a journal. Something unusual must be happening to inflict this ritual on me.” The fall of the Berlin Wall and the rush toward German unification, about which the author’s attitude ranged from profound ambivalence to outright resistance, provided the spur, as the political and economic climate in his homeland would tempt Grass to renounce his German citizenship and cause critics to disparage him as “the nation’s pessimist” or even a traitor. Though he shows no reluctance to “challenge the politicians’ pieties and spit in the unity soup,” even Grass wonders whether he is “merely a captive of the past, a dinosaur.” The author is not usually prone to intimate confession, but he provides a daily account of a year that saw Germany win the World Cup, his extended family experience a birth, a wedding and a death, and the author ponder various conceptual permutations of what would become his next novel, The Call of the Toad. Some of the most entertaining passages are those that seem out of character—e.g., “Poked my head into the minibar, which contained three bottles, nothing else. I thought I was pouring a glass of mineral water and found myself downing vodka, and a minute ago, instead of my cigarillo, I stuck half a pretzel stick in my mouth and sucked and sucked on it.”
Very much the work of a writer conscious of his role as a political man of letters. Much of what he finds interesting may not interest readers two decades after the fact.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-36460-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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