With vibrant portraits of Chaucer’s contemporaries—including the imperious John of Gaunt and the shifty London mayor...
Strohm (Humanities, Emeritus/Columbia Univ.; Conscience: A Very Short Introduction, 2011, etc.) brings his authority as a medievalist to this lively biography, focused on Geoffrey Chaucer’s radical change of fortunes in 1386.
At age 43, Chaucer lost his patronage job as controller of customs at the Wool Wharf, was evicted from his London apartment, and was living apart from his wife and mostly estranged from his children. In short, writes Strohm, “he suddenly found himself without a patron, without a faction, without a dwelling, without a job, and—perhaps most seriously—without a city.” In these straits, however, he dedicated himself to the vocation of writing. Strohm notes that Chaucer had completed more than half of his literary works before 1386 but not The Canterbury Tales. Although he devoted time to his craft while he served in various court positions for more than 20 years, he did not yet consider himself a poet but instead “wrote as a matter of personal choice and not for acclaim or reward,” addressing his works to an audience comprised of close friends. That circle of friends, however, fell away with his ouster from London. Strohm argues that the format of The Canterbury Tales directly responded to this lack of audience with a bold artistic strategy: “[T]he vivid portrait gallery of Canterbury Pilgrims” became both tellers of tales and listeners, “a body of ambitiously mixed participants suitable for a collection of tales unprecedented in their variety and scope.” With little historical evidence of Chaucer’s personal life, Strohm judiciously mines official documents and Chaucer’s literary works to draw inferences about his private activities and associations and to reveal his attitudes about love, loyalty, politics and fame. He argues that Chaucer “undoubtedly possessed a competitive edge” over English poets and, intriguingly, his near contemporary Boccaccio.
With vibrant portraits of Chaucer’s contemporaries—including the imperious John of Gaunt and the shifty London mayor Nicholas Brembre—Strohm’s focus on one year in Chaucer’s life offers an expansive view of medieval England.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0670026432
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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