Gripping soap opera tells a tale of the Eternal City’s artistic transcendence.
A well-documented account follows the thread of ambition, pride, and betrayal that drove an unparalleled explosion of arts and architecture in Europe’s 17th-century cultural capital.
Give Morrissey, with 20 years’ architectural writing experience, credit for not just gleaning cogent commentary from previous volumes on the output of his two subjects but for enhancing it. His handling of these personalities and their divergent careers brings fresh passion (and a sense of their frustration) to the remarkable tale of two gifted talents drawn to Rome at the height of ecclesiastical extravagance (if not corruption) that sought expression in marble, bronze, and grand designs. Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (b. Naples, 1598) was the son of a Florentine sculptor; Francesco Castelli (b. Swiss-governed Lugano, 1599), who would change his name to Borromini, was a stonecutter’s son who honed his talents in Milan. When both arrived in Rome before 1620, Bernini, his work noticed by the influential Borghese family, was presented to the Pope, while Borromini went to work for a relative, Carlo Maderno, an architect charged with the daunting task of rebuilding the ancient church of St. Peter’s. What began as a partnership between the two on the St. Peter’s project was altered forever by the death of Maderno, when Bernini was tapped as chief architect and designer. He was less technically competent as an architect than Borromini, Morrissey notes, but had papal favor, and thus began a time where Borromini’s designs and conceptual input were subtly incorporated, sans credit, into Bernini’s resume. The resulting antagonism was to last for their entire professional lives, but the real difference as Bernini’s star rose and Borromini’s did not in a golden age of clerical commissions, Morrissey suggests, is that “if Bernini had perfect artistic pitch, Borromini was socially tone-deaf.” In the end are Bernini’s anointing as the period’s greatest artist, Borromini’s ghastly suicide.
Gripping soap opera tells a tale of the Eternal City’s artistic transcendence.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-052533-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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