Mostly fun campfire ghost stories marred by pseudo-scientific babble and a self-conscious rock-star attitude.
Slipknot singer sees dead people.
Apparently, Taylor (Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good, 2011) has backstage passes to the spirit world that not many of us are privileged enough to get: He not only sees ghosts on a regular basis, but he’s also convinced that the same spooks are haunting him everywhere he goes. His first recollection of seeing ghosts was around the age of 9, when he and some friends went on a Goonies-like adventure to a scary-looking old house in his suburb. In that house, he saw his first sinister apparition, which seemed to be an old man who wanted the young whippersnappers out of his house. From then on, according to Taylor, his life has been one big spook-tacular extravaganza filled with supernatural occurrences. (Later in the book, the author does his tedious best to scientifically prove that these spirits can, in fact, walk the terrestrial plane among us.) Taylor recalls stories about seeing a shadow man in a cornfield trying to attack him; he was once pushed down the stairs by a malevolent, otherworldly force; every time he buys a new Munsters-style mansion, it turns out to be haunted by the spirits of dead children. To Taylor’s credit, all these anecdotes about his close encounters with the spirit world are told in exacting detail, and you certainly want to believe him. Unfortunately, insecurity about how his theories and stories will be received comes to the fore in a big way: Taylor alternates between annoying self-deprecation and smug self-congratulation, spending too much time on humorless, expletive-laden rants against those who would dare question his place among the elite few who have regular interface with supernatural beings.
Mostly fun campfire ghost stories marred by pseudo-scientific babble and a self-conscious rock-star attitude.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-306-82164-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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