An engrossing valediction to the tough, imaginative generation forged by the war.
A remarkable memoir of a British lad’s salad days flying bombers against the Nazis and then repeatedly escaping their prison camps.
Tunstall, who died in 2013, suggests that his debut might be the last of its kind: “To the best of my knowledge, there are fewer than half a dozen of us still alive who were in Colditz during the Second World War.” The author grew up simultaneously irreverent and patriotic, entranced by the early spirit of aviation. An RAF officer when war broke out, Tunstall yearned to fly fighters and participated in chaotic raids against German fuel production, piloting the primitive Hampden bomber. After navigational problems forced him to land on a Dutch beach in August 1940, he and his fellow soldiers were captured by German occupiers. The British prisoners maintained a cheerful defiance, following Tunstall’s training to become “as big a bloody nuisance as possible to the enemy” once a prisoner of war. Immediately, Tunstall became preoccupied by the determination to escape: “I had not [yet] learned that the best time to escape is usually as soon as possible.” Recaptured after two cunning attempts involving fabricated uniforms, Tunstall was sent to the notorious “punishment camp” Colditz Castle. Though considered escape-proof, the Nazis erred in consolidating the most recalcitrant Allied POWs in one place. As the war continued, MI9 increasingly aided the British POWs, smuggling in money and forged documents, while Tunstall audaciously sent them intelligence inside split photographs, via letters he was permitted to send to his fiancee. Tunstall portrays a brutal, surreal time with detailed recall and elegant, roguish humor, though he never loses sight of the larger stakes, noting how the Germans “seemed to wallow in the atmosphere of harsh oppression and hopelessness they had created.”
An engrossing valediction to the tough, imaginative generation forged by the war.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1468310559
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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