Between the dizzying sums lost and gained, Zacks offers a rollicking history perfect for Twain’s countless fans.
An amusing, singular account of the world tour by the nation’s most famous humorist, chased by creditors.
Zacks (Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, 2012, etc.) journeys with Mark Twain (1835-1910) on his around-the-world tour in 1896, when he peddled his “greatest hits” to live admiring audiences in order to gain enough money to keep his creditors at home in check. Having made several disastrous investments—e.g., buying a publishing house and putting his nephew in charge and backing James W. Paige’s pie-in-the-sky mechanical typesetter—Twain also had to support his heiress wife, Livy, and three daughters in grand style in Paris. On the advice of his friend and fellow investor, oil baron H.H. Rogers, Twain turned over all of his assets, including his book copyrights and Paige stock, to his wife to avoid persecution and embarked, with Livy and middle daughter Clara, on a world tour as essentially a stand-up comedian. He offered snippets from his more hilarious material while drumming up thousands of dollars to pay the creditors. Zacks has thoroughly mined the notebooks Twain kept on the tour—which detailed his “almost bizarre” range of interests: “religious preferences in ant colonies, worst public floggings, the anonymity of executioners, the insecurities of God”—and letters home to the two daughters who stayed behind, while tracking the family’s progress across Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and London. Apparently, Twain was beginning to enjoy himself immensely, and these snippets of his performances are endearing and affecting. Although the news of the sudden death of daughter Susy in 1896 dampened the family’s homecoming, Twain was able to recoup many of his losses with new publishing and magazine contracts—and thanks to the financial wiliness of Rogers.
Between the dizzying sums lost and gained, Zacks offers a rollicking history perfect for Twain’s countless fans.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53644-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
