A highly candid memoir of parenthood that often fascinates and occasionally frustrates as the author tries to come to terms...
Permissive parenting clashes with adolescent rebellion amid the skateboarding subculture.
As the two skateboard-obsessed sons become increasingly disruptive to family harmony and the narrative proceeds from school discipline issues to pot-smoking defiance and legal skirmishes over trespassing and graffiti, it would seem that this is building toward a horrific climax. Thankfully for Thompson (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley, 2013, etc.) and his family, the sons stepped back from the precipice toward the end of high school, straightened out, and found some sort of independent maturity. So what initially seemed like a cautionary tale turns out to be a rite-of-passage story. The lacerating power of some of the chapters comes from the author’s recognition that he has perhaps “become their enabler,” that he didn’t recognize where all this was leading until it was almost too late, and that his own teenage experiences with skateboarding and marijuana hadn’t prepared him for this brave new world. “If my 1970s skating had been a pastel-colored tableau, smooth like 1970s AM radio,” he writes, “the boys skated like a gray-hued mash-up of grunge, punk, and rap, all angsty and illegal.” Thompson also confesses to the insecurities of a writer whose career has stalled, who numbs himself with alcohol and has to hide the Xanax after his son tells him that it has become “the new heroin” among their crowd. Could this loving family have handled things differently? Definitely. Could they have handled things better? That’s more difficult to answer. The author admits that his wife worried that this book would “memorialize our incompetence,” while he countered that it would “celebrate our persistence.” It also shows that Thompson recognizes promising material when he sees it (and lives it) and knows how to heighten the drama for narrative momentum.
A highly candid memoir of parenthood that often fascinates and occasionally frustrates as the author tries to come to terms with the causes that have produced these particular effects.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-239434-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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