A biographer and literary critic's memoir of growing up in Hoboken, N.J., in a claustrophobic Italian-American family. DeSalvo (English/Hunter College; Conceived with Malice, 1994, etc.) was the first member of her working-class family to graduate from college. She escaped a stultifying home life—depressed and agoraphobic mother, belligerent and rigid father—through books, movies, study, and boys, boys, boys. She became a Virginia Woolf scholar, writing in her controversial 1989 study about the impact of childhood sexual abuse on Woolf's work. The effort to come to grips with the lingering mental strain caused by her mother's death, her sister's suicide, her memory of childhood traumas of her own—plus the intense, consuming life of an academic writer- -eventually compelled her to write about her own life in an effort to ``to give it some shape, some order.'' The result is an extremely readable book—if not necessarily a lovable one. DeSalvo's prose is plain; her tone often cool. We gain insight into her life and her mother's life—but not her dead sister's. New Jersey of the 1950s is vividly evoked, but DeSalvo's present situation as teacher, wife, and mother is less vivid. Among the book's best elements: a list of her mother's punitive and pathetic attempts at cooking—from liver, heart, and snails to head cheese, eels, and octupus. Vertigo's main failing is a lack of continuity; there is a grab-bag feeling to some of the reminiscences, and sometimes topics are misleadingly highlighted—a chapter called ``Anorexia,'' for example, is not about the anorexia of the author or anyone close to her, but rather about anorexia in general, and the effect is that of DeSalvo's trying to touch all possible feminist bases. Strangely cool, ultimately more successful as cultural history than psychological memoir, DeSalvo's book is nevertheless gripping in its parade of detail and profusion of stories about how ``a working-class Italian girl became a critic and writer.'' (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 21, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-93908-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
