A bravely introspective tale of wanderlust and lustful wandering.
One woman investigates the life and mysterious disappearance of the promising free-spirited writer Barbara Follett (1914-1939) while attempting to retain her own sense of freedom within her marriage.
As a young woman, Smith “was ambivalent about marriage.” She was not ready to take on the domesticity, set routines, and stereotypical family life that she believed anchored one firmly to a place and responsibilities. Though she loved her fiance and shared his love of adventure, she wondered if there was a way to be together and yet still remain untethered enough to avoid the traditional roles she grew up with. While working on a writing project on Follett, Smith could not help but note the similarities to her own life’s struggles and desires for freedom and adventure. The domestic life was not a good fit for Follett, either, and after months of struggling to win her husband back from an affair, one night she disappeared, never to be seen again. In seeking to avoid the predictability of a traditional marriage, Smith and her now-husband set out to see Southeast Asia for a year while she attempted to discover where Follett went after that night, with theories ranging from sailing abroad to murder. After returning to the U.S., Smith and her husband, appetite for adventure whetted, embarked on a different experiment: open marriage. She admits that “historical examples [of open marriage] hardly suggested it was a path to unalloyed bliss.” In discussing this arrangement, Smith does not attempt to hide her longing for freedom and experimentation under the guise of excuses; rather, she looks deeply and unflinchingly at her motivations and the resulting consequences. With alternating chapters that compare Follett’s life, early adventures, and relational issues with Smith’s, the narrative assumes an interesting mirroring effect. However, where Follett chose to steal off into the night, remaining a mystery, Smith decided to be seen, blemishes and all.
A bravely introspective tale of wanderlust and lustful wandering.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56358-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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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