A middling as-told-to memoir, but of some interest to students of recent history—and to intelligence experts, who might want...
He was a quiet man, a good neighbor, kept to himself—until he went funny in the head and took on the Great Satan.
It may have been an incident at the Indianapolis airport that set Osama bin Laden on his long quest to destroy the United States. Recounts Najwa bin Laden, first cousin and first wife of Osama (“It is common for Muslim women to marry their first cousins”), it was then that a blithering yahoo stared belligerently at the veiled women, “curious eyes growing as large as big bugs popping from his skull,” even as her tall, imposing husband sat beside her. But the hatred took time to build, as Osama became first a jihadist and then a terrorist—and, along the way, a father to many children and husband to other women besides Najwa. The fourth child was co-author Omar, who picks up Najwa’s story with somewhat less inclination to psychologizing. Omar is instead often defiant, particularly when dad suggests that all good boys his age ought to be signing up for suicide-bombing detail. “I was turning out to be a disappointment,” writes Omar, “a son who did not want the mantle of power, who wanted peace, not war.” Peace was not in the cards, of course. The bin Ladens recount assassination attempts, constant escapes, secretive relocations to new homes and countries and the occasional lobbed cruise missile. The two logged time in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, before, by Najwa’s account, she was allowed to return to her family in Syria. Omar left separately, just in time to get out before the events of 9/11 and the arrival of American forces in Afghanistan.
A middling as-told-to memoir, but of some interest to students of recent history—and to intelligence experts, who might want to have a chat with the authors about the layout of the Tora Bora caves.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-56016-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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