A well-wrought life of an eminent Victorian who merits our broader acquaintance.
“They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon”: spirited biography of the often dispirited master of the nonsense rhyme.
Remembered mostly as a writer of limericks, a poetic form he made his own, and other frivolities, Edward Lear (1812-1888) had a much broader range: In the Victorian era, ushered in when he was still a teenager, he was widely regarded as an illustrator and, moreover, as a scientific illustrator with a particular gift for painting birds. According to British biographer and historian Uglow (In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815, 2015, etc.), he was also “an intelligent, self-aware depressive” who battled the black dog of melancholy during his long and productive life. Depression aside, Lear was the kind of man who threw himself into projects: He knew everyone who was anyone, teaming up with Tennyson for adventures and working off a considerable head of steam by writing. “Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils,” Lear confessed, but he was capable of much considerable seriousness as well. Throughout the book, Uglow turns up wonderful moments, as when Lear set to work contributing to the “great visual filing system” devised for a scientific collection assembled by the retiring Lord Derby and when he met with Queen Victoria a few times in order to teach her, at her request, how to draw: “A diligent pupil, she copied Lear’s drawing and he, hardly surprisingly, was pleased and encouraging.” Apart from the workhorse Uglow chronicles, Lear was also a peripatetic man of broad interests who seemed, at least outwardly, cheerful. He was, in short, a Victorian man of many parts: a scientist, artist, writer, and spiritual searcher who struggled to overcome what, in one of his “darkest negatives,” he called the condition of being “blank.”
A well-wrought life of an eminent Victorian who merits our broader acquaintance.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-11333-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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