With its unprecedented picture of Mann's character and accomplishments, Heilbut's biography opens up an important new...
This recursive, elliptical study of Thomas Mann's life and writings successfully captures the total Mann, albeit with some sacrifice of narrative cohesion.
With terse elegance, Heilbut (whose previous book was a study of 1930s German artistic and intellectual refugees) knots together diverse moments from Mann's long career. Looping from considerations of definitive late novels like Doctor Faustus back into descriptions of Mann's youth, Heilbut traces how the writer's introversion and self-obsession underwrote his telling commentaries on German society. Heilbut notes that Mann's birth was roughly contemporaneous with the political unification of Germany, the legal emancipation of German Jewry, and the popularization of the term "homosexual.'' Detailed critical readings of Mann's private and public works explore the author's psyche while showing how Mann's literary consciousness became a theater for the exploration of the license and limits of German, Jewish, and homosexual self-expression. Heilbut recounts, for example, how the classic novella Death in Venice celebrates homoerotic longing while depicting a national idol dying amid debased tourism. Boldly venturing where other recent Mann biographers—Ronald Hayman and Donald Prater—tread only haltingly, Heilbut cites letters and journal entries in contending that the straitlaced Mann not only acted on his homoerotic impulses, but moreover had tacit understandings with his family about his orientation. Heilbut's path is emphatically not linear; the best recent chronological account remains Hayman's. And in large part because of his book's associative structure, Heilbut fails to capture the force of Mann's activism against Hitler and subsequent exile with the acuity that Prater displays. Nevertheless, Heilbut does convey plenty of relevant intellectual history, connecting Mann to contemporaries like Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno, and noting the important influence on his work of writers like Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Whitman.
With its unprecedented picture of Mann's character and accomplishments, Heilbut's biography opens up an important new perspective in Mann studies.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-394-55633-X
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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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