A colorful meandering that is most original and compelling when it focuses on the author’s hard-won peace with her family.
A mix of memoir and fiction attempts to reconstruct a novel that burned—along with the author’s home and family keepsakes—in the terrible Oakland Hills fire of 1991.
“If a woman is to write a Book of Peace, it is given to her to know devastation,” NBA-winner Kingston (Tripmaster Monkey, 1989, etc.) begins in the eloquent first section, an account of the day that fire destroyed The Fourth Book of Peace, her novel-in-progress. It is also the day of her father’s funeral, and as Kingston drives home into the heart of the fire, she has two thoughts: either “the fire is to make us know Iraq” (it takes place during the first Gulf War), or “my father is trying to kill me, to take me with him.” Pursuing memories of her immigrant father in a series of free-associative leaps, she remembers the Chinese lore that he and her still-living, eccentric mother have imparted to her, much of it guidance for dealing with the aftermath of devastation. A few days later, at a conference, Kingston remembers the impetus for her lost novel—to rediscover the vanished Chinese texts of the legendary Three Books of Peace—and resolves to do two things to honor it: reconstruct the text, and initiate a series of writing workshops for Vietnam veterans. The rest rambles somewhat. The reconstructed novel, set during the Vietnam War, tracks a young family fleeing California for Hawaii to avoid the draft and has little plot beyond the characters’ opposition to the war; it feels rushed. The final section—a diaristic account of the workshops for vets—is well-meaning but lacks the splendid insights of Kingston’s best writing.
A colorful meandering that is most original and compelling when it focuses on the author’s hard-won peace with her family.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-44075-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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