Courageous and emotionally intense.
The follow-up to Calcaterra’s bestselling Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island (2013).
In her second book, the author teams up with her youngest sister, Maloney, to tell the story of their alcoholic and psychologically damaged mother, Cookie. Their two older sisters managed to leave the family through marriage or moving in with friends; Calcaterra sought legal emancipation at age 14. However, because Maloney and her brother, Norm, were still young children, they were forced to stay with Cookie, who “only wanted [them] for the welfare checks.” When she was “too busy” drinking and carousing to look after Maloney and her brother, the pair went into a foster care home, where they were abused. Cookie eventually kidnapped her children and took them to live with an assortment of men she picked up in bars or on the street. To escape legal problems and being “put in the slammer,” Cookie and her children left for Idaho. There they stayed with friends until Cookie was caught stealing from her hosts. Life only began to stabilize for Maloney and Norm after Cookie finally settled down with Clyde, the Mormon husband of another woman. As Maloney entered adolescence, she endured unwanted sexual advances from Clyde, more beatings from her mother, and virtual enslavement as a worker on the farm where they lived. School and the hope of reunion with her sisters, who did whatever they could to help, saved Maloney from a temporary slide into alcohol and drugs and occasional thoughts of suicide. In the end, she not only broke free of Cookie, but also found the happiness that had eluded her throughout her youth. As engrossing as Etched in Sand, this book is a testament to Maloney’s remarkable resilience and a moving tribute to the unbreakable bond of love she shared with her siblings.
Courageous and emotionally intense.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241258-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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