Vergangenheitsverarbeitung is one of those post-WW II German coinages that admit defeat by their very existence. It means ``coming to terms with the past.'' Neiman's fine memoir of six years in Berlin, 1982-88, explores German attempts to face up to, or hide from (or both), the Nazi years. This is a rich broth of a book, full of sharply drawn characters, lively vignettes, verbatim barroom conversations, a journal kept with intellect and sympathy. If life is no longer a cabaret, at least it's a Kneipe, a rock-bottom, working-class or student hangout: Neiman (Philosophy/Yale) describes dozens of them. Her account is a last, loving look at the divided city, the Wall, the East Germans shut up behind it, the West Germans living their subsidized, claustrophobic, hothouse life of radical ease and experiment. It's an earnest autobiography, as Neiman, an American Jew, comes to terms with the past by staking a claim on the future. She marries a German Jew, they have a son, and decide to raise him in the traditions and perhaps even the faith they both have neglected. Neiman squeezes every nuance of meaning and paradox and irony out of her life as a student, teacher, political activist, lover. When a German painter boyfriend tells her, ``Every time I see you, I think of Dachau, baby,'' she knows it's the beginning of the end for them. The combination of lofty sources—Neiman knows Nietzsche and Kant—and gritty detail is unusual and appealing. The only flaw here is a tendency, common in Americans, to write about Germany as if nothing happened there before 1933. (And a mention, now and then, of the wider European context wouldn't have hurt.) But the narrow personal focus gives the memoir its punch. And Neiman's strong sense of humor mostly keeps her righteous anger from sounding smug. Finally, her Berlin 80's, materially shabby, spiritually rich, make us wish—as she intends- -that we'd spent the decade differently over here.
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8052-4112-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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