A memoir with an often refreshingly upbeat perspective on life presented in lieu of tension or drama.
An author chronicles her life of love and happiness spent on farms in West Virginia.
Scarff was born in a two-room house on her grandfather’s farm in 1936. “As I have said in many ways,” she writes, “love was a big part of my life. I experienced it from all directions.” From playing in fields with her siblings to constant adoration of her parents, Scarff paints her childhood as nothing short of idyllic. She fills pages with the excitement of changing times and stories of mischief set throughout West Virginia. Although Scarff never articulates dissatisfaction with her quiet, enjoyable country living, she does display a sense of assertiveness and curiosity. These qualities led her to marry Carlo Martini, an older, exciting man who became the father of her first three children through adoption. However, the age difference affected their relationship; Scarff divorced Martini and became a teacher. She later met Jim, also divorced and a parent of children in her class. They married and blended a large, loving family of seven children. No life is completely charmed, however, and Scarff details struggles with illness and heartache—most notably her father’s encounter with electroshock therapy—but what drives this memoir is the author’s joy-filled life. She constructs her book from stray observations and even a short collection of poems treating her love for God and nature with simple, sweet rhymes like “Clouds”: “Which of those gliding across the sky / Could be the one in our Savior’s eye?” This structure tends to reduce the most complex situations and expand on seemingly insignificant details. For example, her thoughts on divorcing Carlo are brief and sudden, but she supplies a relatively lengthy reminiscence of the family’s 4-wheel-drive Bronco. Many readers might wish for a more sustained narrative that delves deeper into the drama and tension present in any life, but those who can appreciate a lighthearted conversation with a wise woman who wants to focus on the joys she has experienced will find her positive attitude infectious.
A memoir with an often refreshingly upbeat perspective on life presented in lieu of tension or drama.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4969-5804-4
Page Count: 158
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
