A lengthy exploration of one family’s uniquely claustrophobic dysfunctions; Frank only finds mixed success in delivering a...
A writer reflects on his celebrated aunt’s overbearing influence on his life.
Eccentric family dynamics provide the backdrop for this coming-of-age memoir from Frank, a travel writer and former Los Angeles Times book critic, who recalls the unusually close ties between his immediate family and his aunt and uncle, noted screenwriters Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch. The two families lived just blocks apart from each other in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of LA. The driving power source within the family is Harriet, aka Auntie Hankie, a charismatic yet manipulative and narcissistic woman with lavish spending habits and pretentious manners. Early on in Frank’s childhood, Hankie showed great interest in his upbringing, aggressively influencing his interests and tastes and eventually becoming an all-consuming force in his life and major disrupter within the family. As he grew through his teens and early adult life, Hankie’s influence became increasingly difficult for him to bear. Throughout much of the narrative, the author documents her frequently erratic and cruel behavior in relentless detail. Though she was clearly a deeply troubled individual, the portrayal feels excessively narrow; there seems to be more to her than Frank conveys here. The author alludes to her glamorous Hollywood connections yet provides scant attention to her actual work. Though not necessarily a household name for current moviegoing audiences, her accomplishments as a screenwriter, often in collaboration with her husband, were significant, especially in such notable films as Hud (1963), starting Paul Newman, and Norma Rae (1979), starring Sally Field and Beau Bridges, both of which earned Academy Award nominations. The author occasionally displays a novelist’s flare in his descriptions of family members and the LA environment of the 1960s and ’70s, but readers may feel that there is more to this story than what is presented here.
A lengthy exploration of one family’s uniquely claustrophobic dysfunctions; Frank only finds mixed success in delivering a compelling narrative to bolster the provocative premise.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-21012-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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