Preachiness aside: a lively, intelligent example of African-American Christian uplift.
In a memoir larded with inspirational messages, its title borrowed from her syndicated column, Young describes her childhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
The author’s black neighborhood, Stoner Hill, seems a throwback to an earlier time: a semi-rural world in which clichéd idylls of strawberry-picking, church attendance, and loving family gatherings contrast with the more dramatic if no less familiar incidents of violence and failed ambition that poverty engenders. Whites remain a vague enemy, seldom actually encountered. Young Londa grows up influenced by three powerful women. Londa’s mother survives being shot by her ex-husband when Londa is six to do whatever it takes to provide a stable and upwardly mobile life for her children and herself. Despite unrelenting poverty, Londa’s grandmother maintains a supportive and loving home in which she and her husband raise a passel of children. Londa’s great-grandmother, “Big Momma,” is the spiritual heart of this devoutly Baptist family, and in Big Momma’s tradition, Young cannot resist teaching lessons. Even her earliest memory, of playing musical chairs her friends in their Head Start class, makes the game an obvious metaphor for a world in which there will not be enough opportunities to go around. Smart and ambitious, Londa gets the opportunities. When the Stoner Hill kids integrate a white middle school, her mother fights to get her onto the college track, and Londa ends up a student-council member. While the always morally uplifting endings to her stories can become tiresome, the author’s sense of humor about herself is winning. Here’s a girl who can admit to following the rules in The Preppy Handbook for months without realizing that they were written in irony, but who can also admit that those Polo shirts purchased under its sway felt awfully good next to her skin.
Preachiness aside: a lively, intelligent example of African-American Christian uplift.Pub Date: March 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50493-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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