Robertson-Lorant's debut is a solid, eminently readable life of Herman Melville (1819-91), one of America's more enigmatic literary geniuses. Rather than build Melville up—and then hunt him down—as a ``Great White Male,'' Robertson-Lorant explores the sensitive soul of the creator of Moby-Dick—a sensitivity symbolized, to her mind, by Melville's death from ``an enlargement of the heart.'' Melville grew up in New York City and, after his father's life ended in disaster, went to sea as a cabin boy. He would travel the world before settling again in the US in his mid-20s. Turning to writing, Melville published the only works of his to find immediate popular success: the novels Typee and Omoo. Robertson-Lorant shows how these quasi-autobiographical tales of adventure in the Pacific were understood by Melville's readers in the 1840s to make significant, even radical, statements about sexuality and society. Melville married a judge's daughter, and moved in elite circles. But aside from a close friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, he never really capitalized on his prominence. His subsequent books, most of which, like his masterpiece Moby-Dick, were epic allegorical romances, found few contemporary admirers. By the 1860s Melville had to accept work as a low-level customs bureaucrat. Family troubles—discord with his wife, and the apparent suicide of his son—plagued him. Displaying an impressive grasp of literary history, Robertson-Lorant ably catalogues Melville's intentions and unconscious impulses, relating them to the ups and downs of his personal and public lives. Her pacing is brisk throughout, her readings of Melville's fiction sophisticated and just, although they occasionally suffer from a touch of syntactical indigestion, as complicated deconstructive and gender concepts threaten to burst the bounds of mainstream biography. But the effort to incorporate such insights pays off, helping legitimate Robertson-Lorant's claim that Melville, while a sexual progressive, cannot be categorized by today's labels. Nonetheless, a fine guide to Melville's peregrinations in literature and in life. (40 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-59314-9
Page Count: 736
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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
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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