Like its author, this is a hybrid—both casual and entertaining.
A series of travelogues and memoirs linked by the subjects of race and identity.
In 11 pieces ranging in length from mere paragraphs to several pages, Rekdal writes with candor and poetic deftness about experiences in her distant and recent life as a woman of half-Norwegian and half-Chinese descent. In Taipei she traveled with her Chinese mother (making one half of an odd pair whose intimacy confused concierges and shopkeepers), while in Korea (where she taught English at a girls’ high school in a small, conservative town) her lessons evolve into arguments about gender, sexuality, and their attendant mores. Rekdal doesn’t shirk from putting her inner self on the line; her intimate relationships with boyfriends and parents are subject to the same gimlet gaze as foreign places and people—and, depending on whether her travels are within the boundaries of the US or within the bank of her childhood memories, the tone of her collection shifts from the light-hearted and ironic to the ambiguous and even tragic. (A long memoir of Rekdal’s sixth-grade friendship with another student—a black girl from a white foster-family whose own struggle with self and world exacts a price—edges the story into deeper waters, for example.) Her account cannot quite be considered a memoir, nor is it entirely a collection of essays. Its cumulative but delicate strength lies primarily in the author’s narrative and descriptive skills (she has published poems and essays in several small journals), as well as its refusal to be anything more than anecdotal and matter-of-fact. The impish, nothing-to-it-ness of Mark Salzman’s Iron and Silk (as well as Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted ) comes to mind.
Like its author, this is a hybrid—both casual and entertaining.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40937-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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