A socialite. A revolutionary. A sour grandmother. Gimbel, a literary scholar turned freelance journalist, weaves these characters together with a few history lessons for an enjoyably dramatic family-based tale. Gimbel summered in Cuba as a child with her Cuban grandmother, until the revolution, when her relatives came to the US. Returning to the island in 1991, she realizes her own family’s experience has become irrelevant. Instead, she focuses on the remains of another family, aristocrats before the revolution, who decided to stay. Gimbel’s heroine, Naty Revuelta, is still fighting her disillusionment by the revolution she supported in the1950s. A restless housewife and the unofficial press agent to Fidel Castro during his failed raid on the Moncada barracks in 1953, Naty began a flirtatious correspondence with Castro while he was in prison. The love letters the two exchanged are included here. When Castro was released, they consummated their affair, but he quickly disappeared, leaving Naty and her husband with his baby. Soon after the revolution, Naty dismissed her husband in the futile hope that she would reunite with Castro. Naty’s principal companion became her ancient mother. A woman who compared herself to Queen Elizabeth, Naty’s mother, was never a supporter of the revolution. She had stayed in Havana simply because she couldn—t think of living anywhere else. Anxious for guests who could appreciate her crystal and English china, Naty’s mother had little but caustic remarks for her daughter. Telling the tale of a divorced friend, she noted, “They didn’t start agitating for a communist revolution, just because things were difficult.” Naty and Fidel’s daughter had no patience for the revolution either, and found her 15 minutes of fame as a high profile defector to the US. Describing life in a Havana plagued with shortages of electricity, meat, and gasoline, Gimbel rejects dogma to tell an intensely personal story about how the revolution changed everything. (6 photos) (First printing of 50,000; author tour)
Pub Date: June 17, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43053-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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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