A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience.
A Cuban-born academic re-creates a moving emotional journey from Cuba to America.
A cultural anthropologist whose first love was writing poetry and fiction, Behar (Anthropology/Univ. of Michigan; An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, 2007, etc.) is a stylish writer. Her probings about her complicated Jewish Cuban ancestry and family’s immigration to America mine compelling, relevant issues about identity and belonging. Her love of travel first took root at age 5 with her emigration from Havana with her mother, father and small brother in 1962. The family settled in the Ashkenazi section of Forest Hills, Queens, making ends meet selling “fabric, envelopes and shoes.” The young author was thrown, sink or swim, into first-grade, though she knew no English. Bookish and assertive, Behar wanted to pursue her education despite the injunctions imposed by her authoritarian father, and she eventually became a cultural anthropologist, able to use her Spanish for field work among farmers in Spain and Mexico. Her essays meander among these decisive events of her life, circling always back to the place where she began and longed to return: Cuba. She was able to return to her homeland in various capacities over the years, especially as a visiting academic. In “The Freedom to Travel Anywhere in the World,” Behar delineates the glaring discrepancy between her own privileged comings and goings from Michigan, with suitcases laden with plentiful American products, and the dire shortages of and restrictions on her friends and family in Cuba. Yet always, touchingly, she is accorded by her compatriots “political innocence, [and] welcomed with tenderness.”
A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience.Pub Date: April 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5467-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
PROFILES
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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