Perspicacious, penetrating, and instructive.
An erudite and opinionated critic offers up a taster of tantalizing essays.
Former New Yorker editor and Knopf editor-in-chief Gottlieb (Avid Reader: A Life, 2016, etc.), now approaching 90, is still keeping his writing fingers busy in the book world. This collection of previously published essays, mostly book reviews from the New York Review of Books written over the past 10 years, is divided into six sections: Lives, Letters, Music, Dance, Movies, and Observing Dance (notices about dance performances published in the New York Observer). As a book publisher for 60 years and a Farrar, Straus and Giroux author, Gottlieb assesses Boris Kachka’s Hothouse, a history of the publisher. Although the book is a “vigorous and diverting trot…frequently slapdash and overwrought,” it’s a “valuable effort” about a press that has “maintained an amazingly consistent level of quality.” Having penned biographies of George Balanchine and Sarah Bernhardt, Gottlieb is quite adept writing about music and dance. An essay on Clive Davis, the “mogul of moguls of pop music,” easily rests beside the author’s discussions of the “maestro,” Arturo Toscanini, whom Gottlieb puts in the same category with Einstein and Picasso. Conductor Leonard Bernstein, whom Gottlieb worked with as an author, is simultaneously “legendary” and “over-the-top.” The author’s “In the Mood for Love” is a sprightly assessment of romance novels: “Its readership is vast, its satisfactions apparently limitless, its profitability incontestable. And where’s the harm?” He rescues Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 novel Oblomov, about a man who never gets out of bed, and waxes euphoric over Irishman Sebastian Barry’s “luminous” novels. Gottlieb takes on an eclectic mix of subjects: Wilkie Collins, Diana Cooper, John Wilkes Booth, Mary Astor, Ethel Merman, Dorothy Parker, Esther Williams, Lorenz Hart, Maya Plisetskaya, Frank Sinatra, the “awful” film Black Swan, Setsuko Hara, an “actress like no other,” and Thomas Wolfe, who “has gone over the cultural cliff.”
Perspicacious, penetrating, and instructive.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-21991-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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