A work invaluable for what it says, frustrating for what it does not.
The first English translation of the desultory, digressive recollections—originally published in 1933—of the youngest brother of the celebrated playwright, novelist and short-story writer.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis in 1904, grew up in a family that struggled to survive and lived apart for a time while the father looked for work in Moscow after departing the countryside, where his family had risen from serfdom. Eventually, the artistic, intellectual family reassembled, and the boys, though struggling financially, found ways to pay for their educations. Anton became a physician, a profession he never completely surrendered, and then the writer whose stories and plays continue to delight and illuminate. The text here is nothing like a contemporary memoir. There is very little about anyone’s inner life—even Anton’s marriage occurs offstage in several swift sentences—and the author, though he proceeds chronologically, pauses often to append asides on a variety of subjects, including visitors to their house or his own struggles and successes as a writer. He sometimes gets dates and places wrong—the translator makes corrections in the endnotes—and avoids analysis of Anton’s work. He does tell the story of an actual shooting of a seagull that may have been the genesis of that eponymous play, and talks about how Anton met with Tolstoy—but nothing about what occurred. Still, there are memorable images that give us a taste of what a frisky, playful prankster Anton was before TB struck him down. He once went fishing with a friend in formal tails and top hat; he startled another sleeping friend with a flashlight in the face; he kept a pet mongoose that alarmed visitors.
A work invaluable for what it says, frustrating for what it does not.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-61883-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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