The artistic intensity of life suffuses this epic memoir spanning the “interior monologues” of a gifted American artist.
Six glorious decades in the life of an iconic artist, poet, and self-described philosophical anarchist.
Culled from his own journals and more obscure volumes unearthed by editors Diano and Gleeson from the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Ferlinghetti (I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955-1997, 2015, etc.) shares his globe-trotting adventures spanning the revolutionary 1960s to contemporary times in Mexico and Belize in 2010. After having been abroad as a Navy captain in World War II, he earned his literary doctorate at the Sorbonne and married in San Francisco. There, he opened City Lights Bookshop, the Beat poet’s refuge through which he published many works by his friend and traveling companion Allen Ginsberg. In unrushed, conversational prose, his writings escort readers through the lengthier and much more heavily politicized years of his life in the 1960s and ’70s. In often wry and deliciously witty entries, he chronicles his ventures to post-revolutionary Cuba, getting arrested for anti-war protesting in Oakland, California, and his adventurous journey crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express. Ferlinghetti ably captures his wanderlust on cross-country trains hurtling through Paris and Dresden, only to retire in disappointing three-star Verona hotels (“two of the stars must have burned out some time ago”). The author’s raw sketches and original works of lyrical poetry add depth and texture to a narrative already spiced with unfettered cultural criticism (“Paris is now a totally decadent museum of the past”), swatches of stream-of-consciousness “running thoughts,” internal observations, and “curious sexual Italian stories.” Readers curious about how Ferlinghetti’s mind works will find this whirlwind ride through Europe and beyond the ultimate vicarious escape, as his anecdotal musings hover over a richly savored life enjoyed without regret or misgivings.
The artistic intensity of life suffuses this epic memoir spanning the “interior monologues” of a gifted American artist.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63149-001-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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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