A passionate, dreamlike memoir that draws you into its reverie.
A literary memoir from the wife of one of the most beloved figures in children’s literature.
Consuelo Carrillo met the famous French writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Buenos Aires within a year of being widowed from her first husband. The smitten Antoine proposed on the night they met. Overwhelmed by his romantic interest in her, Consuelo fled to France—and Antoine (bearing the gift of a caged puma) quickly followed. This present would prove an apt metaphor for her relationship with the voluble aviator, for Consuelo suffered greatly from the mercurial Antoine’s impulsiveness. Even while Antoine was still deeply in love with her, he always seemed to be on the move, either leaving for one of his flights or uprooting their home and relocating it to some new part of Europe or French West Africa. Finally, after he crashed in Libya and went missing for several days, Consuelo had what can only be described as a nervous breakdown. It was after this that Antoine withdrew emotionally as well as physically from his troubled wife, taking on a mistress and setting up separate homes for himself and Consuelo. Yet he could not bring himself to break completely with his wife, and whenever she seemed on the verge of leaving him for good either circumstance or Antoine himself would conspire to bring her back. He had an endearing childlike wonder at the world around him (matched by an equally childlike selfishness), and he would inevitably repeat his pattern of physical and emotional abandonment upon Consuelo’s returns. This she endured until Antoine disappeared over France during a reconnaissance mission in 1944.
A passionate, dreamlike memoir that draws you into its reverie.Pub Date: July 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50564-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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