Veteran short-story writer Ayer strikes gold with these enchanting sketches of the motley relatives and neighbors who peopled her mother’s rural West Virginia girlhood—back when the 20th century was young and spry.
In 1903, Nellie Wister was 8, the eldest daughter of a successful farmer and a proud homemaker with deep roots in Chinkapin Creek, a frontier world of fob hats, molasses and moonshine, tucked into a remote corner of the Mountain State. The automobile had not yet arrived, and men were still called home from the fields by dinner bells ringing across blue hills and green valleys. Channeling her mother’s voice, Ayer employs well-crafted narrative nuggets and crisp dialogue—plus a few choice nostalgic photographs—to recreate the impressions made on Nellie’s alert young mind by assorted visitors to the Wister homestead, where mares are covered, tobacco is spit and pear butter is turned. We meet the perpetually dressed-in-mourning Jane Hamrick, who “had fifteen children by fifteen different men.” We learn that Cousin Jonathan “ain’t worth the powder it would take to blow him up.” Then there’s Cecil McComas, who enjoyed the distinction of having two horses shot from under him during the Battle of Sharpsburg and “always spoke as if he were shouting over cannon fire.” And one Miss Nettie Hunter who, when introduced, “couldn’t be counted on to answer because she took laudanum.” If Jane Austen had dabbled in whittled wood instead of pieces of ivory, she may have produced this winsome little book. Yet Ayer’s wry sketches plumb profound themes. As her tales accumulate, the travails of the poor, the lost and the luckless of Chinkapin Creek quietly emerge, along with Nellie’s growing sophistication and wonderment over the vicissitudes of courtship, marriage, faith and death. Ayer skillfully imbues the raw perceptions of youth with the wisdom of age. Her Chinkapin Creek is at once funny, fulsome and strange—a place where small, obscure lives achieve a poetry all their own. An accomplished, creative memoir by a writer with serious literary tools—West Virginia, we hardly knew your soulful depths.
Pub Date: June 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615452715
Page Count: 131
Publisher: Chinkapin Publishers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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