A successful attempt to deepen the way we read Dickens, with clues to finding him in his own characters and words.
Pulitzer-winning novelist Smiley (Horse Heaven, 2000, etc.) brings her fluid prose to a fresh and insightful look, through a psychological lens, at the life of Dickens.
True to the always-interesting Penguin Lives form, Smiley takes a leap over the usual approach to biography. Assuming her readers know that Dickens’s family was sent to debtors’ prison when he was a child and that he was humiliated about working in a blacking factory, the author makes her task revealing the man through his writing. She shows us Dickens the “self-made phenomenon”; a truly modern man, a public figure, an actor, and a manipulator. He’s 21 at the outset of this study, sitting in Westminster Abbey on the moment of his first published character sketch, revelling in a quiet, swelling pride. From here, she presents the man as he would have appeared to his contemporaries, weaving together the public presentation of Dickens via his journalism, novels, and letters, stitching up the occasional gap with reference to the more detailed biographies already published. She occasionally credits her reader with too much prior knowledge of the subject’s novels, but in general, she’s a generous guide. Smiley is a writer who knows and loves her craft; her exploration of Dickens’s writing process is clearly aimed at the lay reader and novel-writer alike. Along the way, she reveals his vast energy, his deep social conscience, his prefiguring of Freud, his strong business sense, and his failure to find true companionship. The account is a fast read, glazed with humor even at its most poignant.
A successful attempt to deepen the way we read Dickens, with clues to finding him in his own characters and words.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03077-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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