A moving exploration of widowhood.
Crocker’s memoir about her decision to disinter the coffin where she buried her husband’s letters 40 years earlier, after his death in Vietnam.
In 1969, when Crocker (The Secret Life of Louisa May Alcott, 2013) was 23, her husband Dave was killed in the Vietnam War. They had been married for three years. Distraught, the widow decided that she would not bury his remains but scatter his ashes on the north face of the Eiger, a difficult slope Dave had longed to climb. She placed his letters and photographs, her wedding dress and his Army uniform inside his coffin. The funeral director told her, “Just remember you can’t dig this up. This is permanent.” Crocker was glad to let these memories rest for four decades, until, she writes, “I simply changed my mind.” In 2011, Crocker had the coffin disinterred. She describes this process in the first chapter but leaves readers on the brink of discovering what was inside until the book’s final pages. Since the intervening chapters don’t quote from any of those letters, the final revelation may be anticlimactic. The real focus isn’t on the drama of disinterment but on Crocker’s buried memories, too painful to look at for so many years. With thoughtfulness and grace, she reconstructs the young woman she was (and the family she came from), how she met Dave, what kind of man he was—universally admired and beloved, according to all who served with or met him—being a young military wife, early widowhood, the experience of grief and how she slowly recovered. Her decades-later camaraderie with Dave’s fellow soldiers becomes especially healing. Crocker turns a nice phrase; she says after her husband’s funeral, “The house was jammed with sadness, packed solid with the smother of something terrible.” Some moments (opening the coffin, arriving at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), however, are elongated in a way that doesn’t create suspense, just impatience.
A moving exploration of widowhood.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940863-00-9
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Elm Grove
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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