Sad, almost grim, rewarding.
Award-winning poet Williams (Repair, 1999) looks back on his parents' unhappy marriage, a mix of personalities that was
guaranteed from the start to produce some sparks—and did. Williams's family was in most ways a typical middle-class Jewish family of the post-Depression, postwar era. His father was a businessman who achieved success only relatively late in life, transforming the family's circumstances from dire need to relative comfort. An imposing figure, Dad was a stern and uncompromising man who, by his own choice, never apologized to anyone—a fiercely unhappy fellow. Mom was a lovely but utterly self-involved woman of great fragility, someone who never quite adjusted either to deprivation or sufficiency. Williams opens his slender memoir with a recollection of his first words to his father's dead body, "What a war we had," leaving readers to expect a sordid tale of incest or abuse—yet, mercifully, the family history is a surprisingly conventional one, littered with the kind of little battles that everyone has experienced. Williams explores these skirmishes with considerable fairness to all the participants and that, too, is a nice change of pace from the standard-issue grudge-bearing family memoir of today. Told in a series of short takes—no chapter is longer than four or five pages—this is a thoughtful excavation of ordinary family life, a refreshing change from the usual tiresome dirty laundry. Williams brings a poet's sensibility to the world of familiar people and common pursuits, and he is capable of carrying an unusual amount of insight into the psychology of family life. As more boomer-generation writers age (and as more of their parents die), we can expect to see an ever-growing number of such memoirs—but probably very few of them will be better written than this.
Sad, almost grim, rewarding.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-19984-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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