A book that makes its point over and over again without belaboring it.
As the title suggests, this book shows how profound and pervasive the immigrant influence has been on American life.
Scratch beneath the surface of nearly any facet of what is considered American culture, and you’ll likely find the imprint of someone who came to the country from somewhere else. Such is the lesson of this collaboration between novelist Nović (Girl at War, 2015), who was born and raised in America within an immigrant family, and illustrator Kolesar, who emigrated from Scotland. Here, they celebrate more than 200 individuals, with capsule biographies of no more than a page and full-color portraits that attest to the cultural diversity and vitality of the immigrant influence. “There are 193 member states in the United Nations; this book contains at least one person from each of them,” states the introduction. One two-page spread on “Classic American Products” pays tribute to those responsible for Levi’s, hamburgers, Nathan’s hot dogs, Carvel ice cream, and Chevrolet, all-American iconography that owes its genesis to Germany, Denmark, Poland, Greece, and Switzerland, respectively. The all-American Chef Boyardee was known in his native Italy as Ettore Boiardi. After the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, when he “famously quipped to his doctors, ‘Please tell me you’re Republicans,’ ” three members of his medical team were from Malaysia, “Nicaragua/Mexico,” and “a refugee of Nazi Germany…raised in an American orphanage.” Lest anyone think this is a work of partisan ideology, among those celebrated is “the only naturalized citizen ever to become First Lady, Melania Trump,” balanced a couple of pages later by Hungarian refugee and billionaire human rights activist George Soros. As the narrative clearly shows, from music to fine arts, from the stage to the big screen, from scientific discoveries to athletic records, the history of American culture is impossible to record without significant immigrant representation.
A book that makes its point over and over again without belaboring it.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984819-82-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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