Good storytelling matched with appropriate historical skepticism—a useful model for examining other 10-gallon yarns of...
An inadvertent American archetype comes in for thoughtful consideration in the hands of Coleman (History/Notre Dame Univ.; Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, 2004).
Hugh Glass had no idea he’d be a figure in the history books. A sort of entry-level mountain man in the early days of American exploration in the West, he “approached grizzly bears and bosses with the same disreputable grin.” One of those grizzly bears mutilated him so badly that it was highly unlikely he would survive. Andrew Henry, his boss on a trapping expedition along the Missouri River, left two men to bury Glass. The two men fled when a party of Indians approached, but Glass didn’t die. Instead, he crawled and hobbled for 38 days eastward to the nearest American outpost, swearing to avenge himself on the men who had abandoned him. Richard Harris did a fine job as a wronged man based on Glass in the 1971 film Man in the Wilderness, which figures at turns in Coleman’s vigorous narrative. But Glass, writes the author, turns up in countless other places in the larger story of the American West, an illustration of his staying power as a symbol of an ordinary guy who “merely endured.” It’s not exactly news that the history of the West is peppered with myth and legend spun out precisely to convince other ordinary guys to enter into the dangerous business of taming the frontier. Coleman doesn’t pretend otherwise, instead picking apart the tale of Glass to determine what can be called factual with any confidence. The answer is—well, perhaps not much, though, as Coleman wisely notes, “[t]he truth of these stories matters less than their coincidences.”
Good storytelling matched with appropriate historical skepticism—a useful model for examining other 10-gallon yarns of westward expansion.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8090-5459-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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