This new life of the 19th-century’s most notorious literary celebrity successfully revivifies the poet for our times—albeit not without applying a few shocks. Eisler (O’Keefe and Stieglitz: An American Romance, 1991, etc.) has found in Byron a subject well-fitted to her ability to take frank measure of transgression. In an effective opening vignette, Eisler recreates the contentious scene, after his untimely death at war with revolutionaries in Greece, when Byron’s associates in England collectively burned his shocking memoirs. Then, as if reconstituting those lost recollections, Eisler reconstructs his experiences, however sensational, as closely as possible—without, however, overindulging in speculation of the “he must have felt” variety. While she ably handles Byron’s erotically charged youth and school days, the author comes into her own when handling the heart of his story: his sexual affairs—including the notorious liaison with his own half-sister—conducted in Regency London and then in Italian exile; his travels in Greece, the Levant, and Europe with the Shelleys and others; and above all, his ambitious poetic productions, which would transfix all Europe. In part through close readings of his verses, Eisler captures the urgency of his homosexual loves and the viciousness with which he turned on his wife. While Eisler occasionally crosses the line into the lurid, her reporting, rendered in beautiful prose, seems accurate, even when she argues that Byron, himself molested as a child, molested children in turn. It helps that she also emphasizes Byron’s wider sensuality—exploring his shame over his lameness, his weight issues, and his compulsive athleticism—and the absurdly complex money issues that dogged him. In such contexts, Byron’s wild sexual adventures seem only a part of a lifestyle that was so far ahead of its time as to be not just modern, but perhaps even postmodern. Occasional local crimes of sensationalism, then, contribute to the singular virtue of this volume: it’s the rare doorstop of a literary biography that’s also a legitimate page-turner. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-41299-9
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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
IN THE NEWS
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
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