Kenison’s wise comments on what she calls “the humble business of life” are often a pleasure to read. With repetition,...
From the author of Mitten Strings for God (2000), another gentle reminder to mothers to slow down and savor the joys of the quotidian.
For Kenison, ordinary days were in somewhat short supply in the period covered by this memoir. She decided that her suburban Massachusetts community was too high-pressure and competitive, and that her family would be better off in a more leisurely rural setting. Before finding a new home, the Kenisons sold theirs and moved into her parents’ home along with their two adolescent sons. The house they found in New Hampshire was a run-down, 200-year-old summer cottage. After camping out in it for one idyllic summer, they tore it down and designed and built a new, larger house. While constructing a house is a process normally fraught with tension, the Kenisons’ experience was aggravated by the fact that she unexpectedly lost the job she had held for 16 years, as series editor of The Best American Short Stories. Eventually the new house was, if not completed, at least in move-in condition. As they settled in, the author’s older son, Henry, was in his final year of high school, and anxiety about college admission replaced construction concerns, at least for the author. Kenison, who writes of the necessity of letting go of one’s children, apparently had a hard time actually doing it, and the space devoted to Henry’s struggles and accomplishments seems disproportionate to the rest of the text. Meanwhile, her younger son was going through an exasperating teenage rebellion. “I am constantly reminded of just how high adolescents highs can be on any given day and just how low the lows,” she writes. “What I love most, though, are the rare and deliciously peaceful plateaus in between.”
Kenison’s wise comments on what she calls “the humble business of life” are often a pleasure to read. With repetition, however, the sweetness quotient becomes cloying.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-40948-3
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Springboard Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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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