Visceral memoir of a rough, criminal upbringing in a curious outpost of exiled Siberians near the Moldovan border.
Transnistria was inhabited by a group of transplanted Siberian Urkas, deported during the Stalinist era of Communist collectivization and now deeply entrenched in a nether region. “The people of our villainous district were like one big family,” writes Lilin, who grew up in a house full of wondrous weapons, icons and crucifixes. His father and other males of the family were professional criminals who made good livings as robbers and thugs and boasted a string of prison sentences and violent run-ins with the police. From an early age, the author had to learn the criminal code of conduct, involving elaborate gun-handling rules, resistance to government at all costs, prison stories and the forming of special relationships with older community members, who taught him the old ways. By reciting a Pushkin poem, the author earned a cherished pike, or flick knife, the traditional weapon of the Siberian criminal, and became a hero among his friends. Lilin was also a talented artist and apprenticed at age 12 to learn the trade of the kolshik, or tattoo artist. He and his band of boys were dubbed “Siberian Education,” and were soon embroiled in gang fights, running messages for their fathers and skirmishes with police. In between stints in juvenile prison, the author relates touching moments, such as the prison etiquette still observed when the old criminals dined at Aunt Katya’s restaurant. Lilin’s youthful scrapes and wild yarns eventually ran up against Russian military service at age 18, and the hothead was shipped out to fight saboteurs in Chechnya. A stark account that projects raw energy and youthful swagger.
Pub Date: April 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-08085-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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