Though the menu is familiar, lovers of the early Romantics will enjoy the meal.
A close and charitable look at the rise and fall of one of the most famous friendships in literary history.
Sisman, who left the publishing business to write literary history (Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, 2001), traverses a portion of a vast but well-explored terrain with his latest. Coleridge, Wordsworth—is there something to add to what already resides in the myriad volumes about these two men, their writings, their coevals, their times? Not a lot. Sisman does offer some new perspectives, but mostly this is a summary—a brisk, informed and generally disinterested one (he avoids partisanship)—of the relationship between two extraordinary men. Early in their friendship, Coleridge began to recognize his friend’s superior abilities as a poet, and for years he urged Wordsworth to devote himself to a lengthy masterwork, The Recluse, which Wordsworth could never complete. Sisman does a fine job of rehearsing the stories of the birth of Lyrical Ballads (and the complications of its revisions and subsequent editions), of the closeness between Wordsworth and his devoted sister, Dorothy, of Coleridge’s miserable marriage to Sara, of his passion for another Sara (Hutchinson), of his decline into self-doubt and drugs and ill health. Sisman also shows plainly the growing professional frustrations of Wordsworth, whose early volumes were savaged by critics and who responded with what even his friends characterized as arrogance. Great literary names walk these pages: Godwin, Lamb, Hazlitt, Southey, De Quincey. The final chapters—chronicling the misunderstandings, jealousies, resentments, silences—make for emotional reading. The maps and illustrations (unseen) should be helpful; one wishes, as well, for a chronology.
Though the menu is familiar, lovers of the early Romantics will enjoy the meal.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03822-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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