Flem, a Franco-Belgian psychoanalyst and author, takes a bit of a busman's holiday with this biography/critique of the 18th century's most famous rake. The 12 volumes of Casanova's History of My Life constitute one of the most delightful memoirs ever written. An elegant and witty- -and unexpurgated—-1966 translation by Willard R. Trask finally became available in paperback this spring from Johns Hopkins University Press. So the timing of Flem's biography of Giacomo Casanova, the self-styled Chevalier de Seingalt, is fortuitous. Casanova was not, as he is casually styled, a mere libertine, a heartless and careless seducer of women. Rather, as Flem points out, he was a mercurial figure, a man of many guises—author, actor, soldier, priest, alchemist, scientist, gambler, lottery director, spy—who turned his life into ``an endless carnival.'' Most of all, he was a connoisseur of pleasure and happiness who dedicated much of his life to offering them to women. Yet he was, as Flem notes, ``born under the sign of loss.'' His greatest loves ended tragically, he outlived his closest friends, he was duped repeatedly by women. The Casanova depicted in Flem's book echoes the memoirs, which along with his letters are the main source for this volume. He sought out women who were his intellectual equals, placing a high value on exchanges of the mind as no less important than exchanges of bodily fluids. He is, Flem asserts, a lover of women in the best sense. Flem herself is, in Temerson's graceful translation, a skilled and passionate writer, as befits her subject. But her tone is darker and more elegiac than that of the memoirs and the result is not nearly as entertaining. Flem's book suffers from a peculiar organization in which Casanova's life is explored thematically rather than chronologically; those who are unfamiliar with his memoirs may find this volume opaque at times. A thoughtful and intelligent examination of the great lover, but more effective as analysis and literary criticism than as biography.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-11957-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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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