Affectionate, workmanlike, but disappointing biography of the woman aptly described by Roger Vadim as ``Eve before God lost his temper in the Garden of Eden.'' As much a sociological event as a movie star, Brigitte Bardot transformed modern notions of sex as a subject for movies and as a paradigm for existence. Her mentors, particularly director and first husband Vadim, certainly helped to create the Bardot phenomenon. But Robinson (Yamani, 1989, etc.) shows that the actress's fame arose primarily from the force of her stunning yet simple beauty and her complex yet innocent nature. Unfortunately, his unambitious book does little to elucidate her character. In fairly pedestrian prose, he covers Bardot's life from her birth in Paris in 1934 to her quiet existence today in St. Tropez and her controversial marriage to Bernard d'Ormale, who is associated with ultranationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Robinson delineates Bardot's wildly dichotomous personality, her naive narcissism, her many lovers and husbands, her heartfelt advocacy of animal rights, and the relentless harassment she endured from the media and fans alike. Most of the events described in the book are interesting. Some, such as the relentless publicity surrounding her pregnancy in 1959 (journalists even tried bribing doctors to let them into the delivery room), are horrifying. Yet all but the most avid fans will eventually find Robinson's narrative tedious and repetitious. What little analysis there is—a discussion of French women's use of sex as a weapon, the claim that Bardot was the unwitting forebear of the women's movement—proves fleeting and shallow. Similarly, the author provides no insight into Bardot's films, not even ones as famous as Vadim's And God Created Woman and Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-FÇminin. Despite his best efforts to the contrary, Robinson leaves one feeling that perhaps there really is no more to Bardot than meets the eye. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 5, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-452-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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