An exhaustive account of Hurok's life (1888-1974) and career that disputes the ballet/music presenter's own version (S. Hurok Presents, 1953). Robinson (Sergei Prokofiev, 1987) wants to show a lonely, self-important man: Hurok's family life as pictured here was notable for the distance Hurok kept from wives (the first was discarded for being too ``old country'') and daughter (Isaac Stern seems the only friend who really liked Hurok). But no one can dispute the career: the ``humble boyhood in the oppressed Old Country,'' as Hurok portrayed it, through ``enterprising youth in opportunity-rich America, prosperous and useful adulthood.'' Hurok started out in the 1920's as a ballet presenter to an uninitiated US public. Anna Pavlova was one of his first big artists, and Robinson interjects his own prejudices into that relationship: ``that a deeply spiritual, frequently prudish, and rigorously circumspect woman like Pavlova would ever have entered into a sexual liaison with a squat, ill-spoken, and nearly illiterate Jewish immigrant like Hurok seems highly improbable.'' Robinson follows Hurok's development as a musical presenter even as his ballet work floundered—his total dismissal of American dance led to ongoing feuds with Agnes de Mille and Lucia Chase. Robinson seems reluctant to give Hurok credit (indeed, he often doesn't seem to like his subject), but he does admire the publicity and pressure tactics leading to Marian Anderson's historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Hurok's last big triumph was importing Soviet acts during the cold war; it led, however, to the 1972 bombing of his New York office by the Jewish Defense League: friends and associates agreed that this was the beginning of Hurok's physical decline. He died two years later, in his 80s. Hurok was the last of his kind; and Robinson does shed a lot more light than earlier quasi-autobiographies. A sometimes wobbly accounting but, overall, worthwhile.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-82529-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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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