The resilient lilt to Tucker’s writing allows him, and the reader, to negotiate even the direst moments without despondency.
Debut memoir by Washington Post staffer Tucker describes his attempt with his wife to adopt a sick and abandoned child, setting their saga against the backdrop of Zimbabwe’s social disintegration.
Tucker had seen his share of desperate locales during his years as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa for the Detroit Free Press. A white man who grew up in Mississippi, Tucker in 1998 was living with his Detroit-born, African-American wife Vita in Harare. The Zimbabwean capital was devastated by AIDS: perhaps as much as one-quarter of the population between 25 and 44 had the disease, young parents were dying in droves, and the nation’s traditional social welfare net, the extended family, was overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of abandoned children. Neely and Vita were working as volunteers at the Chinyaradzo Children’s Home when an infant girl, only days old, was brought in. She had been left in chest-high grass a mile from the nearest village. Tucker’s description of their efforts to adopt Chipo (as the orphanage’s matron named her) limns a situation that was part theater of the absurd, part theater of cruelty. Social norms and suspicions conspired to thwart the couple’s every good intention; the simple fact was, he writes, “[Zimbabwe President] Mugabe’s administration wanted very little to do with Americans” and was particularly hostile to foreign journalists. Files were lost and found, the Tuckers were accused of trying to buy the child, the police harassed them. Neely’s position as a correspondent became ever more tenuous; he ultimately chucked his job to concentrate on the adoption process. His tale of love in a time of great political unease has a happy ending when the couple finally flies out of Harare with Chipo eight days before Zimbabweans reject Mugabe’s autocratic new constitution and his followers erupt in violence.
The resilient lilt to Tucker’s writing allows him, and the reader, to negotiate even the direst moments without despondency.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-60976-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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