Johnson negotiates a path between vengeance and hand-wringing despair in this thoughtful and probing collection.
Who pays the costs of violence, whether waged against a person, group, or environment? That’s the broad question Johnson (Creative Nonfiction/Rice Univ.) tackles in this follow-up to her 2014 memoir, The Other Side.
While the author’s previous book described her hellish experience as a victim of kidnap and rape, this book of essays takes the recovery process to the next level, searching for ways to redress loss without resorting to eye-for-eye retribution. Johnson has startled audiences by refusing to wish the worst for her own attacker: “I don’t want him dead. I don’t even want him to suffer. More pain creates more sorrow, sometimes generations of sorrow, and it amplifies injustice rather than cancels it out.” Doling out punishment is easy; the challenge comes in creating change, especially in figuring out just where it begins. As her thoughts switch gears from the personal to the collective, the question of personal culpability increases. She’s against racism, but she knows she has enjoyed white privilege in her role as a professor. She protests against the BP Deepwater Horizon spill but wonders if her own job—at a school that is also a BP beneficiary—doesn’t in some way make her responsible. She asks, too, if rehabilitation is possible when the criminal is either a major corporation or, in the case of a landfill with World War II–era toxic waste, no longer around to face the consequences. “There is no one to arrest for this, to send to jail, to fine or execute or drag to his humiliation on the city square,” writes the author. In the face of crimes that affect both the one and the many, she makes a plea for activism, art, and—as she experienced when her Houston home flooded last year—common decency.
Johnson negotiates a path between vengeance and hand-wringing despair in this thoughtful and probing collection.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5900-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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