Though the author at times gives the impression that she’s talking to herself, overall this reads like a series of postcard...
Marble (Notes from an Italian Garden, 2001) casts a sophisticated eye over episodes of her 40-year residence in the heart of old Rome.
Experienced from both street level and the terrace of her 16th-century apartment on the Piazza Borghese, her impressions possess a pleasing durability, evidence that ancient Roman social, political, and family arrangements—bureaucratic patronage, a tradition of gregariousness, and a penchant for the sensual—still pertain. You can practically hear the silk rustle in Marble’s charming, elegant prose, even when her stories are weightless and fail to stick in any memorable fashion. Little unites these observations other than their author, who goes on about the idiosyncrasies of her maid, her husband’s bad luck when it comes to bicycles (they’re always being stolen), the seagulls that trouble her equanimity, the spats with neighbors and doormen, the click of a mason's hammer, the return of the swifts. Marble takes umbrage at the tawdriness and ubiquity of Italian television and despairs over the traffic. “The street of Rome, built for walking and small chariots, have been taken over by an army of vehicles,” she writes. Perhaps understandably, she often sounds distracted, as if she would rather be thinking about something else. Gardening, for instance: when Marble turns to that topic, though it too tends to be seen in soft focus, she finally displays some passion and a few firm opinions. She appreciates “the trend towards a more personal, less constrained garden style,” she gives sharp reports of gardens in Palmero and the Lepanti Mountains, and she has valuable advice when it comes to the art of the terrace garden.
Though the author at times gives the impression that she’s talking to herself, overall this reads like a series of postcard invocations to Rome: beautiful, intimate, friendly, and welcoming to the gardener.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-60477-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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