At times naïve, but filled with readable insights into the workings of one of America’s most successful charities.
The founder of Feed the Children presents a thorough overview of his life and career, from collecting change on returned bottles to nourishing millions of impoverished people across the globe.
Jones has had a remarkable life, and his page-turning memoir lays out all the key points, including various scandals that have snapped at the heels of his world-famous organization. A few early chapters cover the author’s upbringing in Bowling Green, Ky., and outline the establishment of his ministry in Oklahoma as an evangelical Methodist preacher and anti-porn crusader. Jones entered the public eye via a public mid-1970s confrontation with Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, recalled here in glorious detail. Shortly after this incident, Jones traveled to Haiti, where the idea for Feed the Children came to him. He began by soliciting surplus wheat from Oklahoma farmers to feed starving children in Haiti, and the organization’s focus today remains the effective distribution of food to those who need it. The most impressive passages detail lightning-quick responses to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, providing cogent insights into how Feed the Children mobilized so efficiently in the aftermath of these disasters. Non-Christian readers may balk at Jones’s frequent expressions of religious fervor and his habit of concluding chapters with a firm, somewhat repetitive emphasis on his belief in God’s guidance. But it’s to his credit that he doesn’t swerve from depicting Feed the Children’s darker days, and his writings on the internal workings of the organization during these periods make for engaging reading. In particular, he deals frankly and honestly with the 1999 CBS exposé regarding theft by workers at Feed the Children’s Nashville warehouse, admitting that the incident almost destroyed the organization.
At times naïve, but filled with readable insights into the workings of one of America’s most successful charities.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52136-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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