Despite an ever-present suspicion that this collection of essays is built on a trite and forced premise, it succeeds in celebrating different views of family, self, and space. The best of these 18 essays, by writers such as Tony Earley, Gish Jen, and James Finn Garner, manage to use the construct of a specific room—hallway, kitchen, front porch—to evoke family history and personal relationships. Richard Bausch, Mona Simpson, and Sallie Tisdale look back to childhood and their grandparents' homes as instrumental in forming bonds with home and family. Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells of the early years of the civil rights movement as seen through the family television set. Colin and Kathryn Harrison each write about bedrooms in their home and touch upon issues of responsibility and familial love. Esmeralda Santiago and Jane Smiley write of their solitude, but come to different conclusions: While Santiago sees the closets of her life as an escape from the burdens of poverty and unhappiness, Smiley's essay on the bathroom, one of the strongest in the collection, is a celebration of the body and the senses. In a lovely essay on a family garden that later becomes the grounds of a hotel, Bailey White paints a multigenerational portrait of family and land, and of the way the passage of time ultimately changes what previous generations strove so hard to construct. The afterword, by Allan Gurganus, is a summing up, in which the objects we surround ourselves with resonate with personal meaning, each with its own tale, each instrumental in creating a personal space to call home. Essays, collected by a husband-and-wife editorial and writing team, that invite the reader into the intimacy of the authors' homes and lives with affection, wit, and honesty.
Pub Date: Nov. 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-44206-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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