Still, enough of Carpenter comes off the pages to reveal the elemental audacity we’ve come to associate with the seven...
Mercury astronaut turned thriller-writer Carpenter (The Steel Albatross, 1990) and his daughter put on the dampeners as they tell his life story thus far.
It’s not their subdued tone, though, that robs this autobiography of its potential vitality. That is accomplished by using the third person, which establishes too great a distance between the reader and Carpenter, pulling the rug out from under the immediacy the story begs for—an immediacy that it gets only for the few hours when Carpenter is in his Aurora 7 orbiting Earth: he then takes control of the story much as he did his capsule when the fuel ran out due to equipment malfunction. Carpenter spent his early years in the company of his grandparents, his mother away for long stretches of time in a sanitarium with tuberculosis, his father having deserted the family. Carpenter did keep in touch with his father through letters, which are reproduced here, allowing readers into the head of the young man. As a military test plot at Patuxent, he became a prime candidate for the Mercury Program. Description of the screening and selection process for that adventure, its endless “psychophysiological nit-picking,” hews closely to Tom Wolfe’s handling of it in The Right Stuff, though these authors retune the characterizations (“John Glenn was more ambitious, more talented, funnier, and more charismatic than the humorless Calvinist of The Right Stuff”). The space flight is the centerpiece, a truly dangerous and punishing mission (“I was trained to avoid any active intellectual comprehension of disaster,” he notes as his spacecraft started to fail him). His work for SeaLab after the Mercury Program gets skimmed over. And why mention that he’s had three divorces without then delving at least a bit into that part of the life?
Still, enough of Carpenter comes off the pages to reveal the elemental audacity we’ve come to associate with the seven Mercury astronauts. (16 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-100467-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
