Dunham shows flashes of the humor and sharp eye that make Girls so compelling, but the pleasure of watching the TV show...
Girls creator Dunham reveals all—about losing her virginity, finding a therapist, shooting a series of Web videos about 20-somethings living aimless lives and more.
The book’s jacket recalls the 1970s, when Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown was coaching “mouseburgers” on “having it all.” Dunham opens by saying she’d like to do the same thing for today’s young women that Brown did for her when she picked up Having It All at a thrift store when she was in college: Let them know “a powerful, confident, and yes, even sexy woman could be made, not born.” Dunham then spends the first two sections of the book, “Love & Sex” and “Body,” writing mostly about embarrassing sex, bad breakups and traumatic trips to the gynecologist (“Last summer my vagina started to sting”) while forestalling criticism by saying that her “true friends,” those she imagined when she was an unhappy college student, would “never, ever say ‘too much information’ when you mention a sex dream you had about your father.” The problem isn’t that the author gives us too much information; the problem is that it’s repetitive and often boring, lacking the humor and stylishness of Nora Ephron or Tina Fey. Things pick up in the third section, “Friendship,” but it’s a bit surprising to read this on Page 129: “I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women…I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by.” So why take so long to get to them? The fourth section, “Work,” provides some interesting background on Dunham’s life leading up to Girls, but the last section, “Big Picture,” feels like odds and ends that didn’t fit elsewhere, including essays on therapy, summer camp and hypochondria.
Dunham shows flashes of the humor and sharp eye that make Girls so compelling, but the pleasure of watching the TV show doesn’t translate to the page.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9499-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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