Richly detailed and nuanced: a model of literary biography, and an illumination for students of Hawthorne’s work. (For an...
A thoughtful, absorbing life of the gloomy prince of American literature.
Born Nathaniel Hathorne in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1802, the reluctant hero of Wineapple’s (Sister Brother, 1996, etc.) tale wanted nothing more than to take up the family tradition of seafaring: “his earliest compositions,” she writes, “were said to have been sea stories about bronzed pirates and hardy privateers.” His desire may have been less for seaborne adventure than for simple escape, for, Wineapple ably shows, Hawthorne was always a man apart, one who believed that the writer was “a citizen of another country,” one with no specific point on the map. With a taste for drama and plenty of self-doubt, Hawthorne burned much of his early work (“I am as tractable an author as you ever knew,” he wrote to an editor, “so far as putting my articles into the fire goes; though I cannot abide alterations or omissions”), then took a job as a customs inspector “not because he needed the money or because the country ignored its artists—though both were true—but because he liked it,” and went on to write an exquisite body of short stories and novels that, though now standards of American literature, went little noticed for much of his life. (The first edition of Twice-Told Tales sold only a few hundred copies and was unceremoniously remaindered, and other of his books met much the same fate.) Hawthorne, writes Wineapple, nursed a dark, critical view of life, observing that his Scarlet Letter was “a h–ll fired story, into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light.” His refusal to endorse the abolitionist cause (on which point Wineapple provides a brilliant reading of The Blithedale Romance) and his opposition to the Civil War led detractors to say that he stood for “doubt, darkness, and the Democratic Party.” More difficult, Wineapple writes with much sympathy, were his relations with his children, who bore the burden of his fame and genius over the course of their troubled lives.
Richly detailed and nuanced: a model of literary biography, and an illumination for students of Hawthorne’s work. (For an excerpt of Hawthorne, go to www.kirkusreviews.com.)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40044-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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