Outspoken and vindictive, Tirado embodies the cyclical vortex of today’s struggle to survive.
A challenged mom on welfare gets personal.
Having once lived in a weekly motel, Tirado responded to an Internet thread about what some perceive as poor people’s questionable choices. Her raw, defeatist perspective went viral and fuels much of this book’s emotional reflections on “trying to get back to the starting line” after years subsisting at the poverty level. Resisting the temptation to cast blame on capitalism or random stratification, Tirado attributes her situation to “a mix of my own decisions and some seriously bad luck” and describes the freak rainstorm that flooded and destroyed the contents of her apartment while she was pregnant. Once evicted, things spiraled downward. To live, Tirado embarked on a physically exhaustive, “soul-killing” three-job routine requiring her to shuttle (for miles on foot) from one low-wage, part-time job to the next. The jobs she did qualify for were undercompensated and harmful: a fry cook at a fast-food restaurant or tending bar for a boss who expected sexual favors in exchange for prime shifts. As someone who has lived in the trenches of desperation, Tirado explains that being poor is difficult not just in attempting to scrape by, but also in processing the cultural perception and resultant condescension and degradation from unsympathetic onlookers. Her tone oscillates from educative and resilient, when discussing access to preventive medical care and discount food, to heatedly defensive, as when justifying a poor person’s bad work attitude as a “survival mechanism” or the moral compass of someone who is penniless yet smokes, drinks and drives uninsured. Tirado’s raw reportage offers solidarity for those on the front lines of hardship yet issues a cautionary forewarning to the critical: “Poverty is a potential outcome for all of us.”
Outspoken and vindictive, Tirado embodies the cyclical vortex of today’s struggle to survive.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0399171987
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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