This narrative is taken over by doubtful speculations and by a faithful, but wearying catalogue of an oeuvre renowned for...
It shouldn’t be possible to write a dull life of Amedeo Modigliani, but Meyers (Impressionist Quartet, 2005) manages the task.
The most cursed of the artists maudit who crowded bohemian Paris in the early-20th century, Modigliani burned his candle at both ends and in the middle to boot, dying in obscure poverty only a few years before collectors discovered his work. Among his peers, Modi’s vast talent was legendary, as was his charismatic personality and his striking physical beauty. But in the age of Cubism and abstraction, he dedicated himself to the sensuous, figurative painting evident in his renowned series of erotic nudes and couldn’t help but be overshadowed by his friend and rival Picasso. Though Modigliani never received the recognition he craved, he lived a brief life of extraordinary abandon. A devotee of Nietzsche and of Lautréamont, and a gifted poet himself, this pampered son from a family of bourgeois Italian Jews became the most terrible of Paris’s enfants terribles. Even in a community notorious for its excesses, Modi stood out for the wretched intensity of his drinking and drug use and for the grand passion of his many unhappy love affairs. By the age of 35, he was dead of tuberculosis. Unfortunately for Meyers, Modigliani left almost no letters or diaries behind, and the only written records that survive come from heavily poeticized tributes written after his death. Lacking the material to construct a distinctive portrait, Meyers seeks to render Modigliani by invoking strained comparisons to other men he may have resembled. (“Though the two artists never met, the tragic career of . . . French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Breszka . . . illuminates Modi’s character.”)
This narrative is taken over by doubtful speculations and by a faithful, but wearying catalogue of an oeuvre renowned for its lack of variety.Pub Date: March 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101178-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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