Meets the very high standard set by Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties for describing a young man’s intellectual...
Noted editor Solotaroff picks up where Truth Comes in Blows (1998) left off, describing with compassionate acuity the difficult early adult years that led to his vocation as a literary journalist.
He begins in the summer of 1948, when the 19-year-old Navy veteran meets Lynn Ringler, “a glowing girl with a sexy-arty look and a brooding inner life.” Their romance is bumpy during his first two years as an undergraduate at Ann Arbor, and even after they marry, in 1950, she’s prone to severe depression, not helped by their bumpy sex life and Solotaroff’s uncertainty about whether he should commit himself to fiction (at which several friends tell him he’s not so hot) or a scholarly career, for which he is better suited but unenthusiastic. Two sons, his graduate work at the University of Chicago, and extreme poverty further strain their relationship, which Solotaroff analyzes candidly and, insofar as an outsider can judge, fairly. He writes with equal vividness and perception about mid-20th-century academic stars (Morton Dauwen Zabel, Leslie Fiedler) and ordinary folks (an East Chicago working-class student provides the most moving scene). The best portions here, though, delineate the author’s struggle to reconcile his need to make a living, which a university professorship can provide, with his love for the exciting new literature being published by writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and grad-school pal Philip Roth. Their work demonstrates that the ethnic origins Solotaroff shares could be the stuff of great fiction, though he is increasingly aware he will not be the one writing it. Then an essay on Roth leads to an article about Jewish-American writers in The Times Literary Supplement and lunch in New York with Norman Podhoretz, who offers him a job as associate editor at Commentary. The die is cast, but his marriage survives only two more years.
Meets the very high standard set by Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties for describing a young man’s intellectual coming-of-age with nuanced honesty and genuine emotion. Let’s hope Solotaroff doesn’t take five more years to get to New American Review.Pub Date: June 26, 2003
ISBN: 1-58322-582-X
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
