Obviously modeled on Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the...
Freelance journalist Kendall does his best to jazz up the quiet life of the English polymath who turned finding the right word into a science.
Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) lost his father when he was four years old, and his mother soon began to display signs of the mental instability that afflicted many of her relatives. Growing up with an anxious, smothering parent, Roget took early refuge in notebooks filled with diagrams, mathematical drawings and word lists. As Kendall too often reminds us, these feats of classification “insulated him from his turbulent emotions.” He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and became the protégé of such distinguished elders as Sir Humphry Davy and Jeremy Bentham. Though his first “Collection of English Synonyms classified and arranged” was written in 1805, the pioneering system he devised for organizing words under general, abstract concepts (“Sensation” or “Intellect,” for example) would not be published under the name “thesaurus” until 1852. Meanwhile, Roget settled in London, became a member of the Royal Society, wrote scientific articles and an esteemed treatise on physiology and enjoyed life as an eligible bachelor until marrying an affectionate, considerably younger woman in 1824. Kendall, apparently worried about maintaining reader interest during the long run-up to the publication of the Thesaurus, sprinkles his account with direct dialogue (“ ‘Dr. Roget, I’m so glad to see you,’ gushed the petite poetess”) and set pieces of dubious relevance (the Duke of Wellington’s funeral). Presumably—there are no footnotes—the quotes are drawn from the archive of personal papers dispersed by Roget’s relatives. Together with Kendall’s lame pop-psychologizing (“without this outlet, he may well have lapsed into the madness that gripped numerous family members”), they lend a lightweight tone to the biography of a substantive intellectual figure.
Obviously modeled on Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998), right down to the subtitle and the overhyped prose.Pub Date: March 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15462-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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