Despite that off-putting note, a clever, revealing telling of a life so far.
An inventive debut refracts the life of a disaffected young man through his fascination with The Guinness Book of World Records.
Now 32 and a nonfiction editor for the arts organization Many Mountains Moving, Church lives in Colorado with his wife and son. Most of his memoir, though, looks back on growing up in Lawrence, Kansas, with his mother, father, and brother Matt. While still in elementary school, Church became an avid Guinness reader, buying a new copy every year at the school book-fair. He imagined the motivations of those listed and shares some of those imagined stories here. At other times, Church imagined himself as a record holder, though he knew he lacked the motivation to see any activity to such a conclusion. He opens chapters with citations from the 1980 and ’82 editions, beginning with “Most Variable Stature.” The holder of that record stood less than 4 feet tall at age 21, but eventually topped 7 feet. The entry grabbed the author’s youthful attention because he was an oversized boy, threatening to his classmates. Today, Church is 6 feet 4 and weighs 260 pounds; his bulk plays a significant role throughout the memoir. Brother Matt, younger by 19 months, was more normally sized, more comfortable in his body, and an accomplished daredevil; Church was sometimes irritated by Matt, sometimes in awe of him. Matt figures so prominently in the narrative that it is a shock when, halfway through the text, he dies at age 18 after losing control of his car. Then again, some of the tragedy may have been invented. The Author’s Note that prefaces this “work of creative nonfiction” states that many names have been changed, many distortions and dramatizations included. It ends with these alarming words: “Any resemblance between reality and my imagination is purely coincidental and unintentional. This is not a book of fact. This is a story.”
Despite that off-putting note, a clever, revealing telling of a life so far.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6695-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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