A well-written but unrelenting memoir that portrays the strictures and darkness of a conservative sect.
A group of renegade Catholics takes over a young girl’s life in this debut memoir.
In the early 1960s, Vatican II abandoned the traditional Latin Mass and tried to foster a spirit of ecumenism and liberation. This repelled some traditional Catholics, some of whom turned toward leaders who would preserve what they saw as the old ways; one such leader, Bishop Francis Schuckardt, founded an extremely conservative sect that appealed to the author’s parents. They sent their young daughter to the sect’s boarding school, where, for several years, she says, she witnessed and experienced physical and psychological cruelty. She writes, for example, that she saw her own brother being made to walk on his knees through rocks and gravel as a punishment for giggling; other kids, she says, were taken to “the spanking room”; and at another point, she was told that the hamburgers that she and other girls were eating had been gathered from the trash. Schettler also writes that she heard accounts of drug use and sexual abuse in the community. Meanwhile, the sect’s authorities often hid things from the students, she says, which fostered a sense of social isolation: “We were told only what the superiors wanted us to know,” she writes. This is a grim, emotionally challenging story that shows, in intimate detail, how life in the sect cut the author off from the natural joys of youth. Having grown up in circumstances where she had to constantly “mortify” her eyes, the author repeatedly depicts how the sect twisted her ardent spirituality. The author later became a nun, and she details how she spent much of early adulthood in thrall to feckless and ineffectual superiors. This book will particularly appeal to survivors of cult experiences, as it effectively describes the path the author took through a world of suffocating, distorted religious ardor.
A well-written but unrelenting memoir that portrays the strictures and darkness of a conservative sect.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-692-33197-2
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Lifelong Habits LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2018
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
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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