Only the newest arrivals to Shelley-land will discover any novelty here.
Better known as children’s authors (In Darkness, Death, 2004, etc.), the Hooblers address the adult market with a biography of Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley based on a very shaky premise.
Shelley’s famous novel somehow cursed the lives of George Gordon, Lord Byron and his four guests at Villa Diodati on the night when Byron proposed the celebrated ghost story competition, the authors declare. “A dark star hung over all [those] brilliant young people,” they ominously intone. Within a decade of that summer evening in 1816, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley lost several babies, then Percy drowned; Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont gave birth to Byron’s child, who died at age five; Byron himself was dead before he turned 40; and his friend John Polidori, fifth at the villa, was a probable suicide at 25. They may well have deserved their fates, according to the Hooblers’ highly colored rendering, which depicts everyone involved in Mary’s life as “monsters” in some vague metaphorical sense. Much of what the authors assert is unremarkable. In the early 19th century, children often died young, as did adults. People then—and now—were unfaithful to their spouses, became unhappy and killed themselves, possessed character flaws. In other words, those in the Shelley circle were no more cursed or monstrous than the rest of humanity. The Hooblers further strain their biography’s already over-contrived reliance on Mary’s novel by arguing that she became, in effect, Victor Frankenstein when she devoted herself to reviving her dead husband by publishing his complete poems and burnishing his tarnished reputation. This requires the authors to give very scant attention to Mary’s considerable post-Frankenstein production of novels, stories and nonfiction. Its thin thesis notwithstanding, the volume does reveal that the Hooblers have read the standard biographies of the principals as well as their published correspondence, journals and diaries.
Only the newest arrivals to Shelley-land will discover any novelty here.Pub Date: May 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-00078-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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