A diverse work that requires readers to have multiple personalities—historians, worshippers of wealth and royalty,...
Wake (Kleinwort Benson: The History of Two Families in Banking, 1997, etc.) delivers a multiple biography of the fortunate Caton sisters, who flourished in Maryland and abroad, mostly during the Regency period and its aftermath.
Part Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, part serious history of privileged women in the 19th century, the author’s account will evoke sundry responses—admiration, alarm, boredom, bemusement, gratitude. Wake begins in 1816 when three of the sisters—all gorgeous, rich and mysterious—arrived in London, where they quickly became fixtures on the city’s social scene. The author then returns to the sisters’ family history. They were the granddaughters of Charles Carroll, the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, a man who owned vast tracts of land, managed multiple fecund investments and lived into his 90s. Son-in-law Richard Caton married into the family in 1787, siring the titular sisters. Although Wake provides a few paragraphs about the family’s slaves, she seems to excuse the owners, praising their practice of keeping slave families together and administering only occasional whippings. Throughout, she prefers words like servant to the nastier synonym, and she never deals adequately with the odious reality that these women’s busy lives rested on a foundation of profound human suffering. Wake cuts back and forth, sister to sister, relying on a rich archive of unpublished letters among them, sometimes emphasizing their financial savvy and extensive wardrobes, sometimes their misfortunes of the heart—Marianne had a decades-long “relationship” with the Duke of Wellington, though Wake cannot confirm that they…“did it.”
A diverse work that requires readers to have multiple personalities—historians, worshippers of wealth and royalty, investment bankers and fashion freaks.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0761-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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