Livingston overcomes the collection’s inconsistencies with her dexterity in addressing an impressive range of questions...
Livingston (MFA Program/Univ. of Memphis; Ghostbread, 2009) weaves her own memories throughout ruminations on famous mythical goddesses and pop-culture icons to explore what becoming a woman means both for her—as a Roman Catholic girl coming of age in the late 1980s—and, more broadly, within the context of the real and fictitious women who surround her.
“Shopping days were like a holiday to a family of seven children,” writes the author in “Our Lady of the Lakes.” Although her mother, a single parent living in poverty, usually bought off-brand, “or—God forbid—margarine,” sometimes they were graced with the presence of Land O’Lakes butter. Livingston describes how her siblings would fight about who could play with the package’s cardboard panels. They all wanted to be the one to fold the package just right so that the maiden’s knees became a “stunning pair of breasts, the polished divots looking for all the world like perfectly bronzed nipples.” The author’s balancing act between her own narrative and the backdrop of larger cultural images of womanhood threads throughout this collection, as she tackles such subjects as fertility, teenage pregnancy, loss, and poverty. Some essays—e.g., “The Lady with the Alligator Purse,” which explores her fascination with Susan B. Anthony—have notes of playfulness. “What I’m most interested in,” Livingston tells a friend, “is whether the woman ever had any fun.” Others pieces are decidedly more somber—e.g., “One for Sorrow,” in which the author shares the unique ways young girls lied to her in her time as a school counselor. While Livingston’s prose shines, the pacing and cohesion of the collection occasionally feel off—some topics are exhaustive, while others, like her relationship with her niece, will leave readers wanting more.
Livingston overcomes the collection’s inconsistencies with her dexterity in addressing an impressive range of questions regarding humanity, femininity, and growing up in America.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8067-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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