An excellent start to understanding a writer and her work.
Tantalizing glimpses into the life of a recently-discovered writer.
More than a decade after Berlin (1936-2004) died, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories was published, and she began to find readers (Manual was a finalist for the 2015 Kirkus Prize). In a biographical note that first appeared in Manual, Stephen Emerson writes that Berlin lived a "rather flamboyant existence." This book is certainly evidence of that. The first part is an unfinished memoir chronologically organized by the places she lived, with photographs from her son. It’s the story of a child, then woman, who lived an itinerant existence. Born in Alaska to a father who had to travel for work, the family moved to Idaho and then Kentucky, Montana, Idaho, Texas, and elsewhere. Berlin describes each home in exquisite, imagistic language, providing insights into how her unique writing style evolved. In Helena, a man’s cabin is “an unpainted hut, really, with windows that looked like eyes and a door that was a goofy crooked smile.” In a list of more than 30 of her residences, she crisply describes each—e.g., “House Edward Abbey had lived in. Only one burner worked. Filthy.” And later: “No catastrophe. So far.” A lengthy stay in Santiago, Chile, where she learned Spanish, went well, but her life was filled with hardship, alcoholism, drunken and addicted husbands, and money problems. There’s very little here about her reading and writing, but clearly, the life lived is the inspiration for her stories. The second part contains letters written from 1944 to 1965 revealing a conflicted, anguished young writer. Most are to friend and mentor Ed Dorn, the Black Mountain School poet. In college, she wrote Dorn about sudden ambitions, and in the same letter, “I’m just so fouled up.” In 1960: “I am so miserable. I have never been so afraid and unhappy….I believe…I am a writer…even believe that I am a good one.”
An excellent start to understanding a writer and her work.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-28759-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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