In this sensitive group portrait, Dunn (Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens, 2004, etc.) depicts three women...
Love and rivalry among three talented sisters.
Angela, Daphne and Jeanne du Maurier grew up in a world of make-believe. Their father, Gerald, an actor famous due to his performance in Peter Pan, resisted adulthood and wanted his daughters to remain little girls forever. Their mother, an actress, was distant and often hostile. The three girls were yanked from school when their parents feared they might learn about sex from their classmates and lose their innocence. Isolated, privileged and protected, they knew nothing of the world, even when Britain was roiled by war. Taken to see plays in which Gerald starred, the girls were “treated by the cast and the theatre staff as special mascots.” At home, their lives were directed by a father whose “charming gay exterior” often gave way to “the uncertain, dark and flawed human being within.” In one of her novels, Daphne created a father who mirrored her own: “He was cruel, he was relentless, he was like some oppressive, suffocating power that stifled her and could not be warded off....” Daphne realized later that her “fugitive sense of self only gained substance in her imagination.” She invented a world in which she was a boy “with a boy’s mind and a boy’s heart, and a boy’s love of adventure.” As an adult, reluctantly, she “turned into a girl…and the boy was locked in a box and put away forever.” Daphne, whose fame as a writer (most notably of the novel Rebecca) eclipsed that of her sisters, was the only one who married and had children. Angela, who wrote novels, short stories and two autobiographies, had lasting relationships with women, as did Jeanne, an artist. The two kept their sexuality hidden from their homophobic parents.
In this sensitive group portrait, Dunn (Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens, 2004, etc.) depicts three women struggling to escape Neverland, define for themselves both success and happiness, and hone their own identities.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 979-0-00-734709-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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