A fun collection for lovers of literature and travel.
A collection of letters from an endlessly fascinating writer and world traveler.
Using Dahl’s letters to his mother from age 8, when most British boys headed off to boarding school, until her death in 1967, British documentarian Sturrock (Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl, 2010) has picked just the right ones to show his character and his development into a fun-loving, globe-trotting adult. The only thing missing is some explanation of the schoolboy Briticisms—e.g., conkers, games of “fives” at school. In his letters to his mother, Dahl shared nearly everything, from his antics in school, good and bad, to his colonial life in Tanganyika, where life included a whole lot of drinking. The unfortunate loss of her letters to him causes Sturrock to assume and surmise her influence, but Dahl’s ability as an author is obvious in the tales he passes on to her. In 1940, he crashed his plane in the Libyan desert. Badly burned and with a severe concussion, he took months to convalesce in Alexandria. Rejecting an offer of repatriation to Britain, he healed enough to return to flying in Greece, although not for long. His headaches and blackouts finished his air career. In a clear case of knowing the right people, he was posted to Washington, D.C., as assistant air attaché in the British Embassy, where he met countless celebrities and even spent a weekend at Hyde Park. C.S. Forester asked him to write up a piece on the Royal Air Force, and when his publisher saw it, his career was launched. It was mostly smooth sailing after that, with articles in the Saturday Evening Post and a request from Walt Disney to come to California to write a book about the RAF. In addition to curating the letters, Sturrock provides a nice balance of context for each period.
A fun collection for lovers of literature and travel.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-16846-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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