The bright bolt of Robert Graves's thralldom to The White Goddess in the figure of Laura Riding—a long, rich, butchering madness; middle volume in Richard Graves's life of his uncle Robert, begun with Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926 (1987). Richard Graves opens with Robert's return from the trenches in France, where he'd been shot through the lung and left for dead. Now suffering bouts of shell shock and deep insecurity, Robert feels his marriage to Nancy Nicholson splintering, with financial hardship magnified by four children. Enter American poet Laura Riding into the Graves household, as collaborator with admired fellow-poet Graves on a book about modern poetry. At first Nancy and Laura dress alike, almost as sisters, and get along well as the family moves to Cairo. Soon, however, a menage á trois is born that shocks their friends and all of Graves's family. But the trio hangs tight, moves into a houseboat on the Thames. Riding proves herself a towering genius (and supreme egoist), corrects all of Robert's poems and novels. Nancy is not Robert's intellectual equal. Only Laura gives him a focus that raises him above shell shock and the horror of the trenches. In a fit of jealousy, she jumps out a fourth-story window onto concrete—and Robert jumps right after her!—but from the third floor. Both survive but now Robert is Laura's, body and soul; he departs his family miseries and despairs, sets forth with Laura to Majorca. However, now that Robert is her servant, Laura can no longer allow him her body since—no longer her equal—he's unworthy of her. Laura, no beauty, looks like a small Hittite princess, with large nose, receding chin, and she always wears a tiara lettered LAURA. While guiding him through his acclaimed autobiography Goodbye to All That and his historical best-sellers, including I, Claudius (whose success she despised), her influence takes over Graves completely—and she becomes The White Goddess. They stay together for 16 years until Laura discards the broken Robert in favor of an intellectually dominating replacement she can have sex with. A poet spellbound by truth, inspiration, and horror. Gripping.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1990
ISBN: 0333432258
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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