``A culture is not better than its woods,'' Auden once said. And since the British poet spent his last days in the Wienerwald, the partially landscaped woodlands of Vienna that are the subject of this book, Hofmann begins with these words. This is really a memoir, since travel writer Hofmann is returning to the sylvan sites of his own Viennese youth—woodlands steeped in cultural history, a place of intimate and sometimes secretive pleasure as well as scandal. Beethoven had a fondness for these woods, as did Freud and Mahler. In fact, they were a favorite haunt of practically every major figure in Viennese history. Emperor Franz Josef tried to lure back his wayward and wandering wife, Elizabeth, with a magnificent hunting lodge there. At Mayerling, a Wienerwald village, the Crown Prince Rudolph apparently committed suicide with Baroness Marie Vetsera in 1889. Hofmann takes us on a series of walks, or tours, through the woods' different areas. The historical material that pops up as we follow the author is perhaps more interesting than the sometimes lame observations of meals, comments, encounters. The accounts of Kafka's four happy days with Milena here (perhaps the only happy days of his life spent with a woman), of the development of the Biedermeier era's romanticism, and of the Strauss waltz closely associated with the countryside are charmingly informative and relaxed. Particularly curious is the telling of Egon Schiele's brief imprisonment in the prison of Neulengbach (he had an unfortunate proclivity for painting undressed and underaged girls). The book also has the virtue of being a de facto hands-on guide to walking in the Wienerwald, but one that will be primarily read as an anecdotal view of a largely vanished culture.
Pub Date: May 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-8050-2595-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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