Valiant and heartbreaking.
Eye-opening memoir by the spouse of a 9/11 victim.
The near-miss courtship of Kristen and Ron Breitweiser was anything but a fairy tale. Seton Hall law student Kristen initially believed Ron to be a boozy stalker and spurned his advances. But he was exceptionally persistent and eventually proved himself to be a romantic husband and a proud father. Daughter Caroline was born a year after the death, from cancer, of Kristen’s mother, and the author herself was diagnosed with a breast tumor just prior to September 11. Breitweiser’s devastation over the loss of her husband—he died at the World Trade Center—quickly morphed into vengeful frustration with the “bureaucracy of death.” Incapacitated for a time by grief and paranoia, she eventually began attending Victims’ Rights meetings, where she was befriended and ultimately empowered by three other widows, all seeking answers from double-talking government agencies. She was disgusted by the manipulative machinations of the Victims’ Compensation Fund, which the author believes set a precedent for “assigning a finite value for the pain and suffering of any victim” that encouraged airlines and corporations “to conduct a very cold calculation. . . . Is it cheaper to overhaul our product to make it safer for the public at large or is it just cheaper to pay for the dead and injured?” Just over a year after the tragedy, the author fired up her “Widowmobile,” headed to Washington and spoke before the Joint Intelligence Committee of Congress, arguing for the formation of an independent 9/11 Commission to investigate the nation’s intelligence failures. Illuminated by the media spotlight, Breitweiser’s plight got its due, but questions remained unanswered. Among the grim moments that drive home the burdens survivors bear, the author describes the painful disposal of her New Jersey home’s contents (including her dead husband’s clothes) and the medical examiner’s overdue delivery of Ron’s right arm.
Valiant and heartbreaking.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57932-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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