How to find pleasure and fault here and there about the city, delineated with a pleasingly naked candor.
From novelist Janowitz (Peyton Amberg, 2003, etc.): an uneven but not unappealing collection of short nonfiction written primarily for magazines.
The 78 pieces included here are all over the map—mostly the map of New York City, though the author takes a couple of side excursions, such as her trip to China to pick up her adopted daughter. Janowitz is ready to tackle almost any topic in her trademark prickly, deadpan manner; strangely, that very flatness gives these articles their life. Chronicling everyday travails is her strong suit. She can grouse with the best of them, noting indignantly that despite being tempted at every corner by a fabulous restaurant, “the modern New York woman is expected to have the same shape as that of a really tough villager who lives in a primitive place and spends the day hunting and gathering.” She can explain what it’s like to live with a dog that gets depressed after losing a fight, and she can make her ferret-fixation scarily palpable: “I thought I had to smell a ferret or I would go mad. It was even worse than the six months or so that I obsessed with eating sand.” Some of the pieces are too short, most notably a narrative about being “raped” by butterflies, intertwined with the story of a horrible traffic accident she’s involved in. That’s a piece that cries out for more detail. A surfeit of material bemoans Janowitz’s failures in dress, hairstyle, and comportment, and she works the jaded angle awfully hard. (On her mothering abilities: “It wasn’t that I didn’t love being with her—I did, for up to fifteen minutes at a time.”) The highlight here is an overarching portrait of her home borough, Brooklyn, so sensitive that it’s hard to believe she ever lived in Manhattan.
How to find pleasure and fault here and there about the city, delineated with a pleasingly naked candor.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32062-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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