A well-told story, crisp with particulars, of the fundamental engagement of a Western family with the lives of ordinary...
A son strives to understand his father, an iconoclastic Methodist missionary to India during the ’20s and ’30s.
Williams’ father, Fred, arrived in India in 1921 as part of the Methodist ministry. He was, from the start, called “to help meet people’s mundane human needs down here on planet Earth,” writes Williams in an easeful, searching voice. Fred understood the evangelical aspects of his mission–to convert as many Hindus to Christianity as he could–but this soon lost any meaning when it failed to address urgent, everyday concerns. He was drawn to the philosophical, political and cross-cultural issues that roiled India during these pre-independence days, and Williams evokes them all with bite and immediacy. There, on the plains of Bengal, Fred partook in an experiment in rural education, cutting like a torch through the Hindu caste system, convincing his students to appreciate the dignity of labor–in that anything removing us from our work, removes us from our lives–inhabiting elegant, appropriate mud houses and making good use of the glories of a sanitation system. Proselytizing took a back seat to encouraging self-government, countering conditions that led to disease, poking moneylenders in the eye and curbing population growth. There was an enormous need to handle infant and female health care, which Williams found of greater value than “foisting one’s religion on others.” None of this, Williams admits, exempts his parents from ingrained colonial superiorities. Still, they were ready to relinquish their Western lifestyle and embrace the clothing and food of their neighbors, and their desire for independence. Everything would come to a head in India with Gandhi–the challenge to tradition and custom, undermining the hierarchy of class that suffocated independence. Williams’ parents, who forged a friendship with the iconic leader, joined the fray, offering practical advice in place of tallying another Christian.
A well-told story, crisp with particulars, of the fundamental engagement of a Western family with the lives of ordinary Indians during a pivotal moment in history.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1936
ISBN: 978-0-595-46500-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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