A well-honed and meticulously researched, drink-by-drink account of one of literature's greatest squandered talents. In British freelance journalist Bowker's inexorable account, Malcolm Lowry (190957) emerges as the archetypal poäte mauditmad, bad, and dangerous to know. He was a violent and habitual drunk, a liar, coward, procrastinator, and occasional genius whose richly innovative work has influenced everyone from Pynchon to Ginsburg. Ten tormented years in the making, Under the Volcano, his semi- autobiographical, alcohol-soaked masterpiece, set a standard of excellence that weighed oppressively on Lowry for the rest of his life. What followedsome poems, long short stories, and fragments of novelswas flashed with brilliance but invariably flawed. However, Bowker makes a strong case for the enduring literary value of Lowry's correspondence, some of which he believes ``rank[s] among the finest of the century.'' Much of the impetus behind Lowry's later writing was a great, unrealized Åber-plan, appropriately called The Voyage That Never Ends. Proustian in its ambitions, it would draw together all of Lowry's past and future work, including Volcano, into an epically vast meditation on sin and redemption. Bowker believes that this Brobdingnagian plan ultimately became an excuse for Lowry not to finish anything. Writers generally don't lead exciting lives; between reading, writing, and the usual unhappiness, there is not much time left over for event. Lowry, despite his share of misfortunes, was no exception. But Bowker masterfully works this potentially monotone material into a Lowryesque interior epic of moral struggle. His analysis of Lowry's work is also keen-eyed, illuminating innumerable autobiographical roots. If there are faults in this subtle portrait, they lie more with Lowry than with Bowker. Everything a literary biography should be. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-12748-0
Page Count: 720
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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