An enormously appealing memoir despite a slow start.
Duncombe (Trailing, 2012), an expat therapist who specializes in uprooted families, writes about her own family’s transition from Paris to Lyon, France.
This exceedingly readable memoir begins on a somewhat sour note. After eight years in Paris, the author’s husband, Tano, took a job in the smaller city of Lyon, insisting that he’d had “enough of the big city life. Enough of the cost of living. Enough of our family of four crammed into a 635-square-feet-apartment.” Duncombe was a sort of professional expat herself due to her father’s career with the U.S. Foreign Service, so she was more suited to the nomadic life than most. She even worked as a therapist, advising families on how to handle just the sort of transition she now faced. But giving advice is often easier than living it. Lyon, she says, was “a French San Diego….I have never seen so many people in spandex.” Things began to look up, though, when she found an enormous—and enormously charming—apartment in a shamelessly expensive neighborhood. One major drawback: the titular five flights of stairs—a vertigo-inducing climb, with or without groceries. Still, once Duncombe focuses on her creation of a new life, her writing undergoes a remarkable transformation. Pre-move, her tone comes off as complaining, as Tano wants to live in the suburbs, and she wants to live in town: “Without French driver’s licenses we cannot get a car, and without a car there is no way we can live in the rural suburbs, and this suits me just fine,” she notes. But with Paris in the rearview mirror (mostly), her observations become much sharper and her tone a lot livelier. She’s also funny; in a scene at her little boy’s after-school playgroup, for example, she dubs a triumvirate of sleek French mothers/mistresses “The Charlie’s Angels.” Her impression of another group, “the Louis Vuitton plastic surgery trio,” is less favorable: “frail ankles and age-spotted hands give them away as much older women.” Although this book may get off to a stumbling start, patient readers will find this a smart story for smart women (and men).
An enormously appealing memoir despite a slow start.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5234-7226-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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