Serviceable but ultimately uninspiring.
Biographer/novelist/journalist du Plessix Gray (Them, 2005, etc.) brings her personal and professional expertise in French culture, letters, politics and history to a short biography of the celebrated liberal writer and political provocateur.
The vivacious and scholarly daughter of Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s director general of finance, Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) gained notoriety as the flamboyant doyenne of salons she hosted in her elegant homes in pre-Revolutionary France. An early and ardent champion of women’s rights, the unhappily married Staël also enjoyed a series of sexual liaisons with a procession of suitors young and old enchanted by her wealth, charm, intelligence, candor and liberal ideals. She eventually drew the ire of Napoleon Bonaparte, who took umbrage at the progressive views she espoused in her prolific writings in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Staël’s forthright condemnation of the emperor might well have drawn harsh punishment, but she was careful to cultivate powerful protectors, including his foreign minister; Napoleon had to settle for periodically exiling her from Paris in the latter years of her life. Du Plessix Gray delivers insightful passages on Staël’s addiction to opium, noting that it was commonly used for medicinal purposes throughout Europe in the late 18th century and that the French iconoclast shared her affinity for the drug with such fellow writers as Coleridge, Baudelaire, Dickens, Poe and Keats. For all her flair and élan, Staël remains a shadowy figure here. Upstaged by her biographer’s musings on Necker, the French Revolution, her nonstop parade of lovers and the insecurities of Bonaparte, Staël never stands at the forefront of her own life story. Still, the book is likely to find an audience among devotees of French politics, literature, feminism and salon culture.
Serviceable but ultimately uninspiring.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-934633-17-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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