A wise and affecting memoir, remarkable for its honesty and lack of self-pity, of a life lived in interesting times by Czech- born feminist historian Bell. The daughter of Jewish parents who converted to Lutheranism in their youth, Bell describes her idyllic prewar childhood in Tropau, a provincial town in Czechoslovakia. The only child of a prominent local lawyer and his much younger, beautiful, and talented wife, Bell enjoyed a childhood rich in friendship, family associations, and love. But when Germany marched into the Sudetenland, and the rest of the world stood by, the idyll ended. Regarded as Jewish by the Nazis and penalized by the newly enacted racial laws, the family decided to emigrate. Taking advantage of the only visa available—for domestic work—Susan and her mother left for England in 1939, hoping once there to arrange a visa for her father; but the Holocaust took him away forever. In England, while her mother worked as a maid in a succession of households until the visa rules changed, Susan attended local schools, experiencing all the hardships of wartime England as well as the more usual ups and downs of adolescence. After a brief and disillusioning visit to a newly liberated Communist Czechoslovakia, Susan returned to England, where she spent two years in a hospital and on crutches recovering from TB brought on by the poor diet and living conditions of the postwar period. Marriage finally brought her to California, where, a late bloomer and nearly 40, she began a distinguished academic career as a historian. Friends, family, and associates are vividly evoked, as are the difficult times Bell lived through, but it is she herself, modest and self-deprecating, who is the real heroine of this poignant story of great loss and some gain.
Pub Date: July 29, 1991
ISBN: 0-525-93314-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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