A thoroughly readable biography—the first in 30 years—of the eclectic-minded collector, patron, and designer whose unique legacy, an art-filled Venetian palazzo in Boston's Fenway neighborhood, continues to inspire visitors to the present day. A fan of baseball and boxing, the bohemian Gardner, born in 1840 and living at the dawn of the media age, was able to use the negative response of a patriarchal society to female accomplishment for her own purpose—what the author calls ``the art of scandal.'' In her relationships with men other than her husband, Jack Gardner—the painter John Singer Sargent, and writers Henry James and Francis Crawford included—she scandalized Boston society. Crawford and Gardner, writes the author, were deeply, passionately intimate—soul mates, for sure- -but this need not suggest a sexual union, he says. In art collecting, Gardner found her vocation. In Paris in 1892 she purchased Vermeer's Le Concert for $6,000. Soon, with the help of Bernard Berenson, she added a major Botticelli and Titian's Rape of Europa. At the high point of her life (and this book) lies the building in 190001 of her museum/home, a whimsical pastiche whose construction incorporates such disparate elements as medieval choir stalls, architectural fragments, and Spanish tiles, all shipped from Europe. ``Mrs. Jack'' would fill Fenway Court—which featured a series of Venetian terraces opening onto a six-story courtyard domed in steel and glass, art and music galleries, an apartment on the top floor, even a private chapel- -with priceless paintings and decorative arts from East and West. Gardner, who bridged old and new worlds in her tastes, her tolerance for social outcasts such as Jews and homosexuals, displayed grace and independence. Art historian Shand-Tucci (Boston Bohemia, not reviewed, etc.) here succeeds in depicting her as fully three-dimensional, writing her life as an odyssey, ``a Kunstlerroman as the Germans call it, an `artist's novel' '' of literary, intellectual, artistic, and religious quest. (47 b&w, 4 color illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-018643-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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