An elegiac, bittersweet, and well-told account of a remarkable man’s life.
Ross’ debut recounts the gripping life of Holocaust survivor Abe Peck.
Ross met Peck while volunteering at a survivors’ event; the result is a book-length interview. The author supplements Peck’s story with personal material and historical background. Peck’s childhood home, the Polish town of Szadek, was invaded by Nazi forces when he was 14 years old. Over the next six years, Peck survived the ghetto, work camps, and forced marches, finally being liberated by Allied forces at age 20. Though Peck’s survival is in a sense a triumph over the Third Reich, the overall tone here is more mournful than triumphant. Peck is part of the 2.5 percent of Szadek’s Jewish population that survived the Holocaust. He lost 83 of his 89 immediate relatives. Peck himself is quick to state that his survival was as much luck—being a certain number in an SS roll call, for example—as it was persistence. Photographs of lost family members further communicate this sense of immense loss. Peck recalls experiences of grief, grueling labor, illness, starvation, anti-Semitism, and cruelty. After his liberation, he married another survivor, had a son, and built a successful furniture business in the United States. A particularly bittersweet chapter portrays Peck’s return to Szadek to help rededicate the town’s Jewish cemetery. While Ross is an able writer, the real impetus of the book comes from Peck: thoughtful, generous, and a natural storyteller. His quietly devastating account of his adolescence is accompanied by incisive reflection on the ways his experiences shaped his life and sense of self. Ross is clearly a good interviewer, although she sometimes intrudes. She describes the death of Abe’s father, for example, as “heart-wrenching”; of course it was, but such interjections are a distraction. Still, the book is an affecting and effective portrait.
An elegiac, bittersweet, and well-told account of a remarkable man’s life.Pub Date: March 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9964708-0-3
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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