Fascinating and useful, but exceedingly recherché.
A microscopic look at the staid Victorian biographer and pupil of Thomas Carlyle, by novelist and 19th-century scholar Markus (Across an Untried Sea, 2000, etc.).
Drawing on reams of material regarding the long life of J.A. Froude (1818–94), the author fails to extract its essence for the general reader. As a young man, Froude was a Tractarian, a member of the Oxford Movement, founded by his brother Hurrell and John Henry Newman, which sought to purge Protestant elements from the Church of England. But he grew disillusioned as the movement’s leaders were subsumed into Roman Catholicism. In 1849 Froude wrote The Nemesis of Faith, a scandalous novel about a clergyman who doubts his calling; its publication cost him his Oxford fellowship. Excoriated ceaselessly by his father, a Devonshire archdeacon who believed he was profligate and professionally useless, Froude embarked on a literary career. He edited the influential review Fraser’s and forged a name as the distinguished biographer of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Benjamin Disraeli and, most importantly, Scottish historian, essayist and “seer” Thomas Carlyle. Falling under the spell of Carlyle and his fierce, intelligent, long-suffering wife, Jane, changed the course of Froude’s life. Carlyle convinced Froude that biography was “the only history”; he also, after Jane’s sudden death in 1866, confided to his friend that their 40-year marriage had been sexless. When Carlyle himself died in 1881, Froude honored a promise and published both Thomas’s frank Reminiscence of his wife and Jane’s unexpurgated letters. These blunt portraits of a difficult marriage brought Froude condemnation within the literary world. Undaunted, he went on to write several magisterial volumes on Carlyle’s life and to travel the globe as an unofficial diplomat; he was even reinstated at Oxford in the last years of his life. Markus’s depictions of the harsh treatment young Froude received from his sadistic family and of his sticky relationship with the Carlyles are most interesting, but her text grows cumbersome and disorganized under the weight of so much research material.
Fascinating and useful, but exceedingly recherché.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4555-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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