Members of Merriman’s generation will find this book familiar and moving; younger generations will see through popular...
A thoughtful memoir of the search for meaning in post World War II America.
Merriman escapes Nazi-threatened Russia by the wit and charm of her egotistical, controlling father, only to find that life in America isn’t all that her parents promised her. Growing up in New York City, she spurns the safe, bourgeoisie life of her parents and their expatriate friends and chooses the life of an artist. She smokes pot, attends art school and keeps the company of various unsavory but passionate characters. Later, attempting to paint in a small town in Spain, she leaves the risks of her family’s Jewish faith for the austerity of the Catholic Church. Her conversion takes her on another journey, as she flits from church to church, attempts to dissolve her passionless but appropriate marriage and spends time at the Grail, a women’s religious community in Ohio. Merriman’s prose is lush, conscientious and purposeful. She examines all sides of Jewish cultural identity, European versus American values, the nature of art, and religious piety. Her shopping spree for meaning is quintessentially American, and her story is an in-depth exploration of a generation set adrift between the destruction wreaked by the Holocaust and the prosperity and consumerism of post-war America. She shines a harsh light on everyone, especially herself, and she is rigorous yet kind in her judgments. While her prose can sometimes skew toward the melodramatic, Merriman never falls prey to self-indulgence or the ready-made narratives similar memoirs are so often afflicted with. Her tenuous relationship with her parents, her examination of their difficult marriage and her refusal to give up her dreams because of the sacrifices they made for her are almost shocking in light of the tragedy they survived. Her politics, especially as they relate to religion, feel hollow and confused at times, but it is the confusion of a neophyte and young person rather than the putting-on of airs so many other spiritual memoirs succumb to. All in all, her story is honest, intentional and infused with a commitment to self-exploration sorely lacking in many memoirs today.
Members of Merriman’s generation will find this book familiar and moving; younger generations will see through popular stereotypes into the real struggles of their parents and grandparents.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-557-47890-3
Page Count: 471
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2010
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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