This absorbing account follows a remarkable 19th-century Englishwoman from her London childhood to her final years in Upper Egypt, where she shed many of her European trappings to become Noor ala Noor (Light from the Light), author and healer. With few playmates her own age, Lucie Austin's earliest friends included ``Bun Don'' (``Brother'' John Stuart Mill, then a teenager) and Jeremy Bentham, an adult in whose garden she played, avoiding the panopticon prison laid out on the flower beds. Her well-educated mother, Sarah, translated a travelogue and other works from German to help support a husband whose health was chronically fragile and whose career was a chronic failure. When Lucie, who as a youth unsettled acquaintances with a pet snake tucked into her sleeve or hair, married Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, she became, as Frank (A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontâ, 1990) notes, ``a delightful, albeit rather Bohemian hostess'' whose guests included Dickens and Thackeray. Alexander's career at the Treasury failed to advance, so Lucie, like Sarah, took up translation to supplement her family's modest income. In late 1859, Lucie was confronted with a new problem, tuberculosis, and by 1861 was warned she would not survive another English winter. After a trip to southern Africa, she returned to England and was again warned to go abroad. Leaving behind her husband and children, she set out for Egypt; there she spent most of the rest of her life and wrote Letters from Egypt, which made her an unwilling celebrity with European tourists. Unlike the typical English expatriate of her time, she shunned English communities, becoming devoted to the Arabs who surrounded her and to the country she called ``a palimpsest in which the Bible is written over Herodotus and the Koran over that.'' A memorable story that will challenge images of the 19th century as a sepia-toned world inhabited by static women.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-54688-5
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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