Delightful prose and steady observations distinguish this thoughtful narrative of a complex life.
Green’s literary reputation may have lost some luster in the half-century since his last publication, but Treglown (English/Univ. of Warwick) restores its brightness in a lucid and captivating biography.
From 1926 to 1952, English industrialist Henry Yorke (1905–73) published (under his pseudonym) a collection of tersely titled social comedies (e.g., Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing, and Doting) whose pleasant façades masked some very dark undercurrents. Treglown dashes between Henry Green’s novels and Henry Yorke’s life, finding autobiographical illuminations in the world of fiction. Although such a practice is often mired in wild conjecture and improbable flights of fancy, a steady eye to historical fact provides a sturdy and trustworthy framework for the author’s analysis. The fine dividing line between pseudonymous author and aristocratic industrialist demands Treglown’s detailed attention to such matters as Yorke’s school years and married life so that he can ascertain the ways these experiences pop up in Green’s fiction. At the same time, the biographer judiciously yet generously allows his subject to speak directly in quotes that range from deploring the constraints of travel (“It interferes with my masturbation”) to hinting at indiscretions (“I’m taking your wife to a nightclub and I’ll bring her back probably in tatters in the morning”). The ambivalences and ambiguities voiced in these passages assist Treglown in delineating the many facets of a man often at odds with the life he lived, as when he somberly confesses, “Am very depressed, lonely & overworked.” Terry Southern once said that there are writers and writers’ writers, but that Green was a writers’ writers’ writer. Muddling through that obfuscatory compliment may be a challenge, but Treglown gives ample evidence of its accuracy.
Delightful prose and steady observations distinguish this thoughtful narrative of a complex life.Pub Date: March 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-43303-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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