On this spring’s centennial of Twain’s death, the scholarly speculation serves as a long, inconclusive footnote.
A valiant attempt to untangle the complications of Mark Twain’s later years, but ultimately it raises as many questions as it answers.
The “other woman” in the title of this exhaustively researched study by Pitzer College president Trombley (Mark Twain in the Company of Women, 1994) is Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who served the author she called “the King” as his private secretary and so much more—though how much more remains open to debate. There was gossip of an affair and perhaps even a possible engagement, though Trombley never claims the former and Twain shot down any possibility of the latter: “I have not known, and I shall never know…any one who could fill the place of the wife I have lost,” he wrote to the New York Herald, after it had reported on an impending marriage. “I shall never marry again.” Thus he didn’t, likely to the disappointment of Lyon, who filled the vacuum of responsibility left by the death of Twain’s beloved wife, serving as his nurse, groomer, sounding board, card partner, decorator, editor and cheerleader. In the process, she alienated Twain’s two daughters, who are disparaged throughout this account in comparison with Lyon. Not that the book necessarily provides a convincing defense of Lyon, who was beset by depression, alcohol, pain medication, ambition and romantic inclinations toward unlikely partners—not just Twain, some 30 years her senior, but a priest with whom she was infatuated and a business advisor to Twain, 12 years younger than she, whom she married but perhaps never loved. What remains at issue is the degree of her intimacy with Twain, characterized at one point as “multilayered” but later dismissed by its lack—Twain’s candor with her “did not seem to increase their personal intimacy.” The aging author ultimately sided with daughter Clara in accusations that Lyon had swindled him, and he vehemently turned against her.
On this spring’s centennial of Twain’s death, the scholarly speculation serves as a long, inconclusive footnote.Pub Date: March 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27344-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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