A tender story of a childhood isolated by island life and tempered by world events.
A novel about a young man’s struggle to navigate a tumultuous childhood without a father.
Singley (Hook Up, 2014, etc.) describes this bildungsroman as a brief history of a small island off the New Jersey shore from 1948 to 1959. The story begins with a reunion at the Whitefish Tavern, a time-honored haunt for those who grew up on the seasonal vacation retreat. Once the novel introduces its colorful cast of adult characters—a legion of men who still bear the traces of their youthful selves—a man called “Buckeye” steps to the podium to read his account of his childhood (and theirs as well) on South Absecon Island. The remainder of the book relates a narrative within a narrative, as Buckeye reads his book, Downbeach—a story that’s as much about a place and a time as it is about the island’s inhabitants. Much of the tale, as Singley relates it, has the quality of journal entries, without a clear, linear plot structure; it’s more like a pastiche of youthful memories. Buckeye effectively recounts a host of adolescent adventures, including some minor (and not-so-minor) crime, boyish pugilism, and sexual experimentation. Singley reveals Buckeye’s precocious sensitivity when he encounters his first real love interest, Angel, a babysitter visiting the island for the summer; she sadly doubles as Buckeye’s first heartbreak, as well. Holding together this patchwork of remembrances is the narrator’s struggle to manage his entry into manhood without the guidance of his dad, who died during the World War II invasion of Normandy. He also thinks of how his mother dealt with his father’s absence: “Behind me…hung the captain’s photograph; without looking I could feel it. If my Dad...if he had lived, she wouldn’t be sleeping in an old chair in a worn housecoat with a warm can of beer for company.” Overall, this novel’s depiction of the wildness of adolescence is often lighthearted and funny. At the same time, it’s always haunted by the specter of war in the background—and the havoc it wreaks on those left to mourn.
A tender story of a childhood isolated by island life and tempered by world events.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499639858
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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