A thoroughly enjoyable and engaging literary history.
A marvelous account of the world’s first literary festival.
Early on in this delightful book, Stott (English/Univ. of Southern California; The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters, 2014, etc.) notes that after Shakespeare’s death in 1616 “his plays quickly fell from the repertoire.” When Charles II became king in 1660, public performances were encouraged, and works by Ben Jonson and others flourished. Shakespeare’s plays—sometimes heavily revised—and his reputation made a comeback thanks to cheap editions of his works. In 1769, the great English actor David Garrick, “fast on his way to becoming the most famous man in Britain,” decided to celebrate the Bard with a grand Jubilee in sleepy Stratford-upon-Avon. Stott chronicles in luscious detail the ups and downs of the event, from the extensive preparations to the key players involved, including Garrick’s younger brother, George. James Boswell, soon to be author of a masterful biography of Samuel Johnson, called it a “festival of genius.” Johnson “dismissed the Jubilee with scorn.” The Stratford townspeople were apprehensive. Who would pay for it? Where would the anticipated 3,000 visitors stay? Tickets, signed by Garrick, portraits of Garrick and Shakespeare, and commemorative ribbons were issued. A statue of Shakespeare was erected in Stratford, and a massive, wooden rotunda to host balls, dinners, and stage events built. Unfortunately, the event was met with unceasing rain. Roofed chairs carried visitors through the mud, and a pageant was cancelled. Garrick’s lengthy Ode to the “blest genius of the isle” was delivered by the ringmaster himself, with musical accompaniment followed by an elaborate fireworks display that fizzled in the cold rain. As Stott writes, Jubilee was “a defining moment in our cultural history, and one that goes to show how, through a confluence of intent, mishap, and grubby self-interest, the most glorious and enduring of myths was made.”
A thoroughly enjoyable and engaging literary history.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-24865-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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