Emotionally sincere but lacking insight into the music or its composer.
In his debut, a Canadian journalist traces the history of Johann Sebastian Bach’s six cello suites from their composition to their rediscovery almost 200 years later.
Siblin, the former pop-music critic at the Montreal Gazette, travels around the world following the suites through the lives of Bach and Spanish cellist Pablo Casals, whose performances of the suites launched them to their current fame. The author does a thorough job with the biography of Casals, whose life was nothing short of epic, and provides a capable travelogue of his journeys through Europe. However, when it comes to Bach and any sort of nuanced discussion of the suites themselves, Siblin falls short, failing to offer the slightest analysis or interpretation of the music. Even though the six chapters are entitled “Suite 1” through “Suite 6” and subdivided by movement (prelude, allemande, courante, etc.), these titles have little bearing on the actual text. This inability, or unwillingness, to address the music also affects the portion of the narrative devoted to Bach. While the facts about his personal life are quite intriguing and often very funny—he once got into a fist-fight for insulting a bassoonist—no true understanding of Bach’s life can be reached without an earnest engagement with his compositions, which Siblin mostly avoids, aside from a few mentions of polyphony and counterpoint. In later sections, the narrative turns to the author’s personal treasure hunt for manuscripts of the suites, which have yet to be found. It’s an interesting final twist on Siblin’s fixation, but readers may find it difficult to share his excitement, since the author neglects to examine what would be written on those sacred pages.
Emotionally sincere but lacking insight into the music or its composer.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1929-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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