Fans won’t mind, though everyone else will wish this book had had a firmer editor.
An enthusiastic, undisciplined mess of an autobiography by Mexican American writer Villaseñor (Burro Genius, 2004, etc.).
Slightly less New Age–tinged and Mescalito-ish than its predecessor volumes, which have collectively been likened to a Chicano version of Roots, this installment highlights some of Villaseñor’s by now well-practiced narrative tics. One is the seemingly random use of Spanish mashed up in maddeningly repetitive English, as in, “He smiled the biggest smile I’d ever seen him smile and took me into his arms, hugging me in a big abrazo”—hugging him with a hug while smiling a smile, in other words. Another is Villaseñor’s near-trademark use of uppercase words in the middle of otherwise harmless sentences: “Why? Because CONTROL WAS EVERYTHING for him!” Such things notwithstanding, the prurient-minded reader will find Crazy Loco Love a departure in a new direction, for now the author, revisiting his late-adolescent self, becomes exceedingly interested in matters of the flesh: A ripe breast bursts out of a camisa, and it is cause for wonder, for “I’d never seen a girl’s naked breast before, and especially not one this large and up close to my face.” Said vision yields a physical reaction whereby the author’s Levis suddenly seem a touch too tight, and he experiences dizziness and shortness of breath; some 120 pages later he is wetting the bed, but not with urine; later he has finally entered the holy of holies, save with a twist that will raise a shock of recognition in fans of Chinatown. All this makes Villaseñor “crazyloco,” meaning, presumably, crazy in two cultures (though he swears off cultures at book’s end to declare himself simply a Human Being on the way to “BEING with all capitals”), or maybe, given his repetitive habits, simply crazy crazy.
Fans won’t mind, though everyone else will wish this book had had a firmer editor.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55885-315-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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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