A sad phenomenology of human degradation.
A former prisoner of Auschwitz recounts his experience in the camp and his hellish transformation into what he calls an “extermination-camp man”—a human sub-species focused solely on survival and lacking all feelings and the attendant care for others.
At 16, the author was a spoiled teenager living in Paris who loved science, mathematics, and gambling. His childhood had been difficult, full of upheaval as his family moved around Europe: not close to his parents, and not resident anywhere long enough to make real friends, he became a self-sufficient individualist. He was multilingual, adaptable, and familiar with unpleasant changes—all factors that helped him survive the brutality of Auschwitz (where strength, luck, and “the flexibility of a contortionist” were required). Steinberg freely formed alliances with the hardened criminals who were running the camp, who could dispense extra food or other favors. “I concluded that each of these monsters had a flaw, an Achilles heel, which it was up to me to find: this one needed flattering, that one had a repressed paternal instinct or the need to confide in someone who seemed to take an interest in him.” At one point, sick with dysentery and scabies (which cause painful skin ulcers), he concluded that, for all intents and purposes, human relations had ceased to exist and he didn’t even know his own bunkmate. Later, he used his basic knowledge of chemistry to bluff his way into a laboratory assignment in the I.G. Farben factory where prisoners were forced to work. In the lab, he met Primo Levy—who later was to describe Steinberg as a soulless manipulator, an animal obsessed only with his continued existence. Ultimately, Steinberg agrees with this assessment, and admits that he doesn’t even remember meeting Levy—“perhaps because I hadn’t felt he could be useful to me.”
A sad phenomenology of human degradation.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-6064-2
Page Count: 163
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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