A largely successful portrait of an intriguing, complicated historical figure.
Hataway crafts a biography of Thomas Becket from his childhood to his murder in Canterbury Cathedral, narrated by the Beckets’ manservant, Egbert Watson.
Egbert Watson begins this yarn by detailing the life of a servant in a burgher household in 12th- century England. The Normans have conquered and subjugated the Saxons, as exemplified by the Becket and Wat households, but there is already evidence of a new identity emerging: the Englishman. Here, Hataway’s characterization and dialogue falter a bit. Children are given an improbable prescience about the state of society, and both masters and servants deliver expository soliloquys instead of believable exchanges. “My family are business people or people who serve in the government. His mother’s people are farmers,” Gilbert Becket says of his son Thomas. It’s clear that Hataway’s primary goal is to educate readers about medieval England, and the details he selects for this purpose are intriguing even if they sometimes come at the expense of pacing. As Becket matures, beginning his career as a law student and moving on to become England’s chancellor and, finally, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Hataway’s portraiture gains depth. Egbert remains largely sympathetic, but Becket becomes in turns flamboyant, autocratic and pious, sometimes alienating readers with his terse, coldhearted remarks. Different social mores of the times notwithstanding, his friendship with Henry II becomes significantly homoerotic, until Becket’s investiture as archbishop drives the two apart. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Hataway’s novel is Becket’s eventual turn from being an intellectual into being an intransigent, single-minded lion in winter. Notably, this book, published posthumously, was clearly not Hataway’s final draft. The grammar, repetitions of words and shifts in character detail can be somewhat jarring in places. For instance, Egbert, who is mostly personified as a devout Catholic, at one point mentions a love for the Old Saxon gods rather than the church. For a biography with such insight, a more polished edition would be welcome.
A largely successful portrait of an intriguing, complicated historical figure.Pub Date: July 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615735788
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Hataway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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