Dramatic, keenly observed memoir of familial entropy set against the urban “bad old days.”
The barbed tale of a writer’s beginnings, embarrassed yet fascinated by melodramatic, bohemian attorney parents.
Novelist Siegel (All Will Be Revealed, 2007, etc.) dramatizes a surreal upbringing fraught with deception. His mother pushed him toward art and culture, while his father sank into malfeasance. “We were the kind of family that ate out a lot, because home was too rancorous and depressing, and we tended to be a little nicer to each other in public,” he writes. The author’s obese, grandiose father was jailed for too-close involvement with his clients, including counterculture radicals, drug dealers, and the Hells Angels. “In this atmosphere,” he writes, “we could be the normal ones, the representatives of middle-class decency.” After prison, his father rebuilt his practice, but with reduced reputation and income. When one client gave him illicit cash with which to flee the country, he squandered it on junk food and fancy clothes. “I’m not sure why he decided to stay; it’s very possible that he was simply too broken to leave,” writes Siegel. The family’s chaotic domestic life took strange turns, including the adoption of an abused boy to whom, against the author’s expectations, his parents were devoted: “We liked seeing ourselves as the family in charge of the orphanage, full of beautiful waifs.” Still, Siegel’s father continued to neglect his health and responsibilities, and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s long after his behavior became erratic. Breaking away, the author became consumed with Asian culture, living in Japan while laboring over a novel about his father’s crimes, unable to find an authentic voice. Siegel displays his strengths in this memoir: lean, acute prose and sharply recalled environmental details of New York City in the 1970s and ’80s. He examines the familial ties that bind with love and exasperation, and his portrait of his family’s self-destructive contradictions is probing and memorable. The sections focused on his own intellectual growth can seem comparatively meandering and repetitive.
Dramatic, keenly observed memoir of familial entropy set against the urban “bad old days.”Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-037-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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