Caro's travelogue incorporates, with only partial success, the sensibilities of a dogged historical researcher and a chatty tour guide in its trip through French history from Roman Gaul to Louis XIV's court. Caro's goal is to bring to life the star-rated sites in typical guidebooks and to translate the deep French sense of the country's history for an American mind. With a deliberately chronological itinerary, she begins in the Provence of the Roman Empire; continues through medieval Languedoc, Dordogne of the Hundred Years War, and the French Renaissance's Loire; and finishes in Louis XIV's Paris and its environs. Along with many travelers in France (and her husband, biographer Robert Caro, who joins her), she takes in such famous sights as the Pont du Gard, the pilgrimage church of Conques, Bourges, the chÉteau of Blois, and Versailles. Her personal familiarity with a vacationer's instincts means that her routes are well chosen, with a few detours around touristicated places and some chance finds in pleasant hotels and restaurants. (Her own tourist anecdotes, though, are the stuff of rec-room slide shows.) While researched satisfactorily, her approach to site-specific history tends to the parochial, and without an authority's ability to synthesize place and past, even the most notable locales cannot convey the complexities of the Wars of Religion or the Albigensian Crusade. Although outdoing the average French tour guide in information (and congeniality), Caro still has the taste of one in her attachment to the picturesque, whether in architecture and scenery or historical personalities and events: Her portraits of the vastly different Joan of Arc and Catherine de' Medici are alike in their romanticism, as are her snapshots of the Roman Arch of Triumph at Orange and the Castle of UssÇ. Despite her sizeable bibliography, Caro's evocation of French history in her travels is only marginally deeper than that of the Michelin guides. (25 line drawings, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-26672-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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