As solid as its subject’s surviving buildings, and a useful addition to Restoration studies. (16-page color insert, b&w...
A lucid portrait, abrim with encyclopedic detail, of the English architect, scientist, and inventor.
Biographers, it is true, have long overlooked Wren (1632–1723), but British historian Jardine (Ingenious Pursuits, 1999, etc.) incorrectly claims that hers is “the first integrated modern account of his career.” Not so: Adrian Tinniswood’s His Invention So Fertile (2002) was both integrated and modern, if a little on the slow side. Without supplanting Tinniswood’s biography, which is more scientifically fluent, Jardine’s is more pleasurable to read as it covers much of the same ground. The author marvels, and appropriately so, at Wren’s scholarly attainments, extraordinary even in an age when such brilliant, multitalented individuals as John Locke, Samuel Pepys, and William Harvey were working their wonders. Jardine does not shy away from the gruesome subjects of Wren’s early scientific experiments; he once claimed that he could “easily contrive to convey any liquid Poison into the Mass of Blood” and set about doing so by slicing open an unfortunate dog and introducing into it “2 ounces of Infusion of Crocus Metall: thus injected, the Dog immediately fell a Vomitting, & so vomited till he died.” Fortunately for the dogs of London (and squeamish readers), Wren turned to architecture, designing St. Paul’s Cathedral and other grand structures in the aftermath of the great London fire of 1666. Caught up in the complex, antimonarchical political struggles sweeping England, he had a way of picking the losing side, which diminished his reputation within his lifetime. Jardine remarks sympathetically that “the failure of each of his royal patrons in turn . . . to see through to completion the great buildings Wren designed for them as their ‘great Monuments’ was symptomatic of their failure to give moral leadership,” and symptomatic of the difficulties he faced as an artist dependent on a fickle, endangered audience.
As solid as its subject’s surviving buildings, and a useful addition to Restoration studies. (16-page color insert, b&w illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019974-1
Page Count: 624
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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