A multilayered memoir that successfully weaves historical detail with familial emotions of different generations and...
Family lore is shared and family secrets are revealed in this two-in-one memoir, which also offers a unique perspective of a pivotal period in 20th-century Chinese history.
After Ruth Tsao Chai’s death, her surprised family discovered that she had secretly arranged to be buried alone rather than in the plot she and her devoted husband had purchased years before. In order to understand Ruth’s strange choice, her first-born son, Winberg, and her granddaughter, May-lee (My Lucky Face, 1997) examine the woman’s eventful life. Through alternating narratives and points of view, a three-dimensional portrait emerges of a woman who defied traditional expectations. Intelligent, beautiful, stubborn, and a Christian, Ruth was one of the first women admitted to a university in China. She refused an arranged marriage and instead chose Charles, who courted her while they were both students in the US. After they married and returned to China, they became involved in the country’s changing political tides and significant events—including the Japanese invasions. It was Ruth’s intuition that kept her family alive during WWII and enabled them to immigrate to the US. But her life never really turned out as she truly wished, and she grew resentful and suspicious with age and eventually made her unusual burial request. In their investigations, son and granddaughter journeyed to China, where Winberg’s memories were rekindled and May-lee gained a sense of her own identity by learning about her family’s origins. A personal photo appears at the start of each chapter, which nicely creates the illusion of thumbing through a family album. By looking at the faces of people now departed but once vividly alive (especially Ruth’s, as she ages through the chapters), the reader is inspired to address universal moods and longings.
A multilayered memoir that successfully weaves historical detail with familial emotions of different generations and fulfills Ruth’s ultimate wish: to be remembered. (b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26808-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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