In this fourth and final volume of his autobiography (Love in America, 1994, etc.) Green, American expatriate and member of the AcadÇmie Franáaise, recalls with customary candor the years in which he not only became a writer but wrestled with the homosexuality that threatened his equally vital spiritual needs as a devout Catholic. Published first in France in the mid-1960s, this volume picks up with Green's return to his family in Paris after three years at the University of Virginia, a seminal time in his long life. For there he not only enjoyed romantic friendships with other men and fell passionately in love, but also met the family of his beloved southern mother. Back in Paris he took long walks, read widely, and attended Mass daily. While his remarkably tolerant father did not pressure him to find work, Green was aware that he should find something. Writing turned out to be his true mÇtier, and by the end of the volume he's part of the literary crowd surrounding Jean Cocteau and AndrÇ Gide, has published three novels, and has won the 1929 Harper and Book of the Month prize for his novel Adrienne Mesurat. But while from then on literature would be the absorbing work of his life, his struggle to overcome his intense attraction to male physical beauty equally dominated those years. Though convinced that being pure in both body and soul was essential, Green could not refrain from furtive, anonymous one-night stands or falling in love with handsome young men. By 1929 he was a successful writer but of ``the war between the body and the soul . . . had everything still to learn.'' A fitting conclusion to one man's scrupulously accounted-for journey of self-discovery that, like the best of confessional literature, transcends the individual to become universal.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-7145-3002-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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