A stirring tribute to a turbulent, beautifully evoked era.
Bascom, son of missionaries, illuminates the Ethiopia of his childhood in this Bakeless Prize–winning memoir.
After arriving in Addis Ababa as a toddler, Bascom senses the teeming life that surges in the countryside surrounding the capital city. The jarring sounds, intoxicating scents and colorful sights all come alive before him like fireworks. His older brother, Johnathan, is sent off to boarding school at Bingham Academy—the main school for foreign, or ferengi, children and a place that eventually becomes integral to the author’s own experience. In the early years—with his brother absent—young Tim must find his own way. During the day, he follows native housekeeper Marta around as she goes about her chores, and he finds pleasure in watching the exotic wildlife outside his window. A chameleon becomes his personal pet, and their relationship later develops into a central theme here. Bascom, himself a chameleon of sorts, is gifted at assimilation as the scenery changes around him. Whether living in the shadow of Mount Damoto or in a Kansas prairie town, he seems to effortlessly shed the skin of his former life. In Africa, the author and his younger brother Nat dream of taking trips outside their family’s African compound to explore the countryside and smell the eucalyptus, while their father practices medicine and their mother preaches to local women and children. As the memoir progresses, Ethiopian society unfolds before him: He eats injera and wat in a gathering with the Lion of Judah himself, Emperor Haile Selassie, races his beloved horse against a mule belonging to a native missionary and takes cover in the school basement as university students riot. It is that political upheaval that finally forces the family’s return to the States. Along the way, nine-year-old Tim questions his identity as a child of two continents.
A stirring tribute to a turbulent, beautifully evoked era.Pub Date: June 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-65869-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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