Occasionally uneven but a pleasure for Perry’s loyal fans and a book that is likely to win her some new ones as well.
Literary biographer Drayton (Design/Unitec Institute of Technology; Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime, 2008, etc.) turns her attention to novelist Anne Perry (b. 1938) and the past she couldn’t keep hidden.
The author begins at a pivotal moment in Perry’s life: the phone call from a journalist to her agent offering the theory—about to be printed—that Perry was actually Juliet Hulme, perpetrator of a famous New Zealand murder. When that theory turned out to be fact, the lives of Perry and all those connected to her were turned upside down. Perry, her agents and her publicist have always argued that the murder is in the past, and Perry, who committed the crime as a teenager, and her family should be allowed to leave it there. While it is difficult not to feel for Perry, it is equally difficult to ignore the fact that the argument holds sway over this biography as well. Drayton creates a conundrum in which she has made Perry’s unveiling as Hulme the center of the book but also believes it deserves less attention than it’s been given. However, the author ably plumbs the Hulme story for how it has shaped Perry’s crime fiction and provides other insights into Perry’s writing style and process. The author includes detailed background on Perry’s unpublished attempts, as well as the origins and development of many of her best-selling books. Though they interrupt the narrative flow, descriptions of each of Perry’s novels will trigger interest for those unfamiliar with her work. Drayton tells a beguiling story of an author’s climb to the best-seller lists and how a secret she would rather keep hidden was publicly made known.
Occasionally uneven but a pleasure for Perry’s loyal fans and a book that is likely to win her some new ones as well.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62872-324-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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