Los Angelesbased architecture critic and novelist Whiteson (White Snake, 1982) elegantly turns the transformation of his backyard into metaphor and memoir, seamlessly enhanced by his newly acquired gardening lore. Spending time at home to write a novel, which fictionally recreates his meeting with second wife, Aviva, on a Greek Island in the 1970s, Whiteson at first neglects the unkempt garden of the house the couple had bought in the western section of Hollywood in 1987. Ever since working as a young architect in London ``with Englishmen who went on and on about their tea roses and their `mum,' '' he'd ``dismissed garden chatter as supremely silly.'' There was also a darker reason for his dislike: Growing up in Zimbabwe with his Jewish immigrant parents, he had been repelled by his father's obsession with his garden. Unable to love his father as he should, Whiteson had thought his father's garden ``too contrived, too prissy, too fearful of wildness.'' Worse, he felt that it ``unwittingly laid bare his [father's] heartfelt weltschmertz, his sentimental pessimism and tragic sense of life's attrition.'' A Proustian moment at the local hardware store, however, when a strangely familiar scent evokes pleasant memories from the past, prompts Whiteson to buy all the plants that combine to create the fragrance. And of course, he is soon hooked. He now sees his neglected backyard as a ``green novel'' where plants collectively form a ``horticultural narrative.'' But as his ``green novel'' prospers, his ``white garden''—the novel—is dying, and as he records his proper garden response to the novel's failure (by rather drastic means), he weaves in recollections of his African childhood, his two marriages, life in Europe, and insights into what it means to live now in ``crazy-sensible L.A.,'' where ``the only way to cope...is to be rooted in your own defined, defended ground.'' One of those rare books about gardening that encourage rather than intimidate.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-571-19868-6
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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