This Old House for the NPR set.
A doctoral candidate takes on a massive project of home renovation.
In explaining how he and his wife became determined to purchase a house while he was studying for his degree in writing at the University of Utah, rather than renting like most graduate students, Batt writes, “To buy a house—or at least to look in earnest for one—is to admit to yourself that you think you’re ready…It was time to grow up and settle down.” The author was propelled by a sense that adulthood had “coldcocked” them: “everyone but us was dying, getting divorced, or having a kid.” This in turn compelled Batt to recklessly purchase a Fisbo, a “for sale by owner” house with serious long-term maintenance issues—and a largely unexplored reputation as a one-time “crack house.” The author deferred to the earnest eccentricity of the owner (Batt’s character sketches are deft but briefly drawn), who assured him that the house was an undervalued bargain but left Batt the legacy of years of jury-rigged repairs. Much of the book follows Batt as he attempts to renovate the house on a low budget, haplessly doing much of the work himself, and also turning to bemused salt-of-the-earth Utah men for assistance in such tasks as building a cement kitchen counter. A major theme, unsurprisingly, is that of masculinity: Batt’s home-improvement misadventures allow consideration of how hard it is for young men today (particularly intellectual types) to measure up to absent fathers. The embodiment of this idea is Batt’s grandfather, a doctor turned cantankerous, lovelorn old man, whose deterioration provides the main element of the back story of the author’s complicated family life. In the conclusion, Batt discusses his selling of the house and moving on to an academic posting. The relatable author writes clearly, but the twin story engines of personal angst and home-repair strife don’t really mesh, resulting in a memoir that feels inessential and highly specific rather than potentially universal.
This Old House for the NPR set.Pub Date: June 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-63453-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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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