Informative, readable and great fun.
Bryson (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, 2006, etc.) takes a delightful stroll through the history of domestic life.
Now living in a 19th-century church rectory in Norfolk, England, the author decided to learn about the ordinary things of life by exploring each room in his house. In each, he finds the stories that make up this discursive romp through British and American life of the last 150 years. The hall, a large barn-like space with an open hearth, was once the most important room in the house. Indeed, the smoke-filled hall “was the house” until the introduction of chimneys, which allowed houses to grow upward. In the kitchen, Bryson discusses such matters as canning, refrigeration and the serial plagiarist Isabella Beeton’s hugely successful Book of Household Management (1859), which guided homemakers into the 20th century. In the bedroom, the author considers masturbation, syphilis and Victorian advice on how women could avoid arousal by not using their brains excessively. Aspects of other rooms prompt Bryson to relate stories about the spice trade, the rise of cities, Chippendale furniture, the servant class, kerosene, Gilded Age excess, home gardening, epidemics, mousetraps, electricity, arsenic-laced wallpaper, bats, Central Park, fabrics, water cures and the many ways in which people fall down stairs. He traces the derivation of domestic terms, such as ground floor (bare earth floors), the drawing or living room (originally the “withdrawing” room) and boarders (from dining table or “board”); describes the building of homes from Monticello and Mount Vernon to George Washington Vanderbilt’s 250-room Biltmore in North Carolina; and offers wonderful anecdotes, including that of Lord Charles Beresford, a famous rake who, confused by weekend crowding at a country house, entered what he thought was his mistress’s bedroom, cried “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” and leapt into a bed occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife. In a sense, Bryson’s book is a history of “getting comfortable slowly,” and he notes that flushing toilets were the most popular feature at the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851.
Informative, readable and great fun.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1938-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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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