And so it is that Constable is known today, though this literate and lively biography adds new shades to the artist’s...
The Romantic art rebel comes in for thoughtful biographical treatment at the hands of New Yorker alumnus Bailey.
It took the French to make John Constable (1776–1836) English. Which is to say, as Bailey notes, Constable worked for much of his life largely unrecognized, painting idyllic English pastoral landscapes that were dismissed as, well, mere landscapes. “But then,” writes Bailey, “the French took him up—gold medals were bestowed—and the London art world slowly opened its eyes to what he was up to.” Part of the trouble may have been that Constable, who grew up in the countryside and knew his farm equipment, painted landscapes with windmills that look as if the wind could actually turn them, something much too tame for the wild-eyed aesthetic of the Coleridge and Keats school. Constable also seems to have lacked a little of the tireless self-promotional gene that made his contemporaries and sometime rivals such as J.M.W. Turner so successful. For Constable, the kingdom of home and family was enough, and even though he did work and lobby endlessly to get into the Royal Academy, there is some suggestion that he preferred idling in the sticks to the social swirl. Bailey offers persuasive readings of Constable’s work, which includes well-known paintings such as The Hay Wain and Salisbury Cathedral; many landscapes, he finds, are so alive that a viewer, like the painter, “could smell the mud and slime on the banks,” even if some were dashed off, even incomplete. Well into his career, Constable paid to have his portfolio, English Landscape, printed, but he wound up poorer and not much better known; just after his death, some of the works that are most famous today sold at auction for a few pounds. Yet, “despite the less than dramatic prices,” the sale sent many hitherto unknown Constables out into the world.
And so it is that Constable is known today, though this literate and lively biography adds new shades to the artist’s well-earned reputation.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7011-7884-1
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Chatto & Windus/Trafalgar
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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