A sentimental but unfulfilling portrait.
Debut author Sebban draws on her mother’s recently discovered diary in a series of stories that explore life in 1950s Israel from the perspective of a Jewish graduate student.
The author, a former journalist for the Australian Jewish News, explores her mother’s time in Israel in a series of tales that she calls “creative non-fiction.” Her mother, Naomi Moldofsky (née Gross), would later become an acclaimed economist at the University of Melbourne, but in these chapters, the author focuses exclusively on Moldofsky’s year’s as a 20-something, single, Jewish academic. Apart from family and friends, and economists interested in details pertaining to Moldofsky’s intellectual development at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, most readers will be interested in what these stories reveal about 1950s Israeli life and culture. Having spent most of her formative years in Australia, Moldofsky provides a perspective from the “Australian eyes” of a Jewish “outsider.” Her eyewitness account of “Arab terrorists…caught in the market,” her interactions with refugees from Yemen, and her grappling with moral quandaries associated with Zionism and ethnic violence will appeal to anyone interested in life in that country and era. Similarly, as a socially active, single woman who ran in Israeli intellectual circles, Moldofsky often crossed paths with well-known cultural, social, and political figures, such as theater director Shmuel Bunim. However, this brief book doesn’t provide much context about Moldofsky’s personal or family history, with the exception of sporadic anecdotes. Indeed, it’s not made clear why she left a stable job, security, and her family in Australia to go to Israel in the first place, as after her arrival there, she frequently laments her financial straits and expresses fears of violence. Although she’s revealed in these stories to have rejected 1950s-era expectations regarding women’s roles, and to have run in sophisticated circles, Sebban offers readers no clear sense of Moldofsky’s political ideology, her views on Zionism, her religious devotion, or her passions—factors that would have given readers a better idea of who she was as a person.
A sentimental but unfulfilling portrait.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946124-29-6
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Mazo Publishers
Review Posted Online: May 30, 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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