Journalist Solway (A Dance Against Time, 1994) performs a commendable research mission on behalf of the glamorous, troublesome late ballet star Rudolf Nureyev (1938—93). Though as narrator she’s almost too tenaciously conscientious to do justice to his bottomless flamboyance, the dancer’s less savory side (gay hustlers at midnight; jeweled jockstraps) perhaps speaks for itself. In some ways, the most interesting part of the book concerns Nureyev’s life as a child. Born aboard a Trans-Siberian Express train, he grew up a Tatar, descended from Genghis Khan, in the Bashkir Autonomous Republic, with interruptions and stays in Moscow. War and penury beset his Muslim family: “Potatoes were the only staple.” The deprivations of his early life, and Nureyev’s difficult relationship with his taciturn and tyrannical father, may have bred his successive rebellions. Ballet was the most telling of these. Though he started training late and in some respects never could compensate in his technique for the lost time, Nureyev’s determination and remarkably feral allure onstage carried him through adversity at the Leningrad Ballet School and the Kirov Ballet to his celebrated 1961 defection to the West and subsequent decades of theatrical antiheroism. Not for nothing was The Catcher in the Rye one of his favorite books; “Rudimania” saluted a Holdenesque iconoclast in tights. Solway is dogged and diplomatic in pursuit of him. Though her appraisals of his dancing lack the flourish and authority of an insider critic, she passes equably through the turbulent stages of Nureyev’s career, offering apt secondary portraits of Margot Fonteyn, Erik Bruhn, and others. She is careful never to emphasize the tawdry or pathetic in Nureyev; he emerges as a desperate character who mistrusted banks and every other standard authority, who worked himself into unique extremes of exhaustion, and who failed to win the only real love of his life (Bruhn). So despite a few bandied clichÇs, Solway holds the stage. The sound and the fury, distilled. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-12873-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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