A useful addition to the growing body of critical studies of Peake.
An absorbing portrait of the dystopian, sometimes dyspeptic English author and illustrator.
Mervyn Peake (1911–68) is best known for his Gormenghast novels, the basis for a recent BBC television series. He is less known for his superb drawings and paintings, examples of which appear throughout this well-written biography. According to Yorke, who has written similar studies of other relatively obscure English artists, Peake led an almost stereotypically Edwardian childhood. Born in China to missionary parents, he endured public school (“He played for the Chalmers House first cricket XI between 1925 and 1928, but, according to the school magazine, ‘at the present is much too careless’ ”) and came of age in the depths of the Depression. After a bohemian period that included time in an artists’ colony on the island of Sark, Peake found work as an art teacher in London, where he fell in love with one of his students. Though Maeve Gilmore’s family opposed the union, the couple married and enjoyed a happy life together. Peake continued to work as an artist, securing commissions to illustrate children’s books and classics while working throughout the early 1940s on a novel called Titus Groan, which would become the first installment of the Gormenghast series. (Fans will appreciate learning that the novel does not take its name, as is often supposed, from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: “People forget that one of Peake’s favorite artists was Rembrandt, whose only son was called Titus.”) Discharged from the army on grounds of ill-health during WWII, Peake was sent to document the liberated Bergen-Belsen, where he made a haunting study of a girl dying of consumption. Afterward, Yorke writes, a gloom settled over Peake’s writings and drawings—but not necessarily the artist himself—that lasted until his death from Parkinson’s disease 20 years later.
A useful addition to the growing body of critical studies of Peake.Pub Date: June 22, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-211-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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