Instructive, well-poised lessons from the trenches.
Nostalgic, reflective essays on the writing life by the South African novelist Freed (House of Women, 2002, etc).
Her favorite writers are V.S. Naipaul, Marguerite Duras, and Nancy Mitford, from whose work she quotes often in establishing the autobiographical cord to a novelist’s craft. In 11 essays, Freed traces her trajectory from a 1960s childhood in Durban, South Africa, to her reinvention as a much-married expatriate novelist living in California. Freed begins with her reading lists as a child (Enid Blyton and the plays of J.M. Barrie) in an affluent household that until the mid-1970s, she notes, knew no television. The author dwells on the contrasting personalities of her parents, both actors. Freed’s flamboyant, assertive Jewish mother was an especially strong presence; “the love affair she conducted with trouble” obsessed her daughter for 30 years. In the essay “Honorary Son,” she explains that because her two older sisters were beautiful and being groomed for marriage, and her four “shadow” brothers had died in miscarriage, plain Freed was allowed to discover her true nature from her parents’ beneficent neglect, and she gained confidence through defiance and self-assertion. “My sense of male entitlement has carried easily into every sphere of my life,” she writes. She explores the autobiographical elements at length in her novels, especially the first, Home Ground, with its explosive opening paragraph detailing a white child’s “pulling on the penis of the garden boy.” (28) The book was subsequently banned in apartheid South Africa and beyond. Two essential elements in the development of the writer: years of practice and ruthlessness. Her own sense of ruthlessness took her away from her homeland, as an exchange student in Far Rockaway, New York, and later as a teacher trying to impart to her writing students how to sustain a “focus” she took many years to find in her own life.
Instructive, well-poised lessons from the trenches.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101132-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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