A vibrant story of late-blooming love.
A platonic midlife romance strikes creative sparks in this winsome roman á clef.
Fanto, a publisher and artist, knew Richard Ellmann, acclaimed biographer of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, for several years before his death in 1987; the two had collaborated on the creation of a line of arty Wilde-themed playing cards. In Fanto’s fictionalized version of their relationship, they are also soul mates. Nearing 70, Dick Ellmann is a rumpled, warmhearted American scholar, devoted to caring for his invalid wife Mary. Rosita, radiating in all directions from her home in Monte Carlo, is a middle-aged jet-setter who can’t eat dinner in Manhattan without Andy Warhol dropping by her table. But she’s also smart, spontaneous and a devotee of the “l’acte gratuit,” the hidden gesture of uncompensated kindness. (She meets Dick while helping a friend auction off some Joyce letters.) A professional connoisseur of fascinating lives, Dick savors Rosita’s colorful stories of growing up in a wealthy Rumanian family, wartime exile in Brazil, a brother’s assassination and her adventurous encounters with the rich and famous, from Salvador Dali to Orson Welles. In turn, Dick shares his subtle insights into the psyches and geniuses of writers and poets. Their affection grows but is stymied by Dick’s dutifulness toward Mary. It sustains itself on sporadic intercontinental visits, longing letters and hesitant glances full of unspoken desire. A consummation of a kind occurs when Rosita proposes the playing-card project to complement Dick’s soon-to-be-completed Wilde biography, but the aesthetic and intellectual glow of their collaboration darkens as Dick slowly succumbs to Lou Gehrig’s disease. Fanto fills the narrative with risqué witticisms and piquant sketches of the glitterati, but her breezy, stylish prose still conveys the passion and pathos of an attraction that seems all the more intense for being so tightly constrained.
A vibrant story of late-blooming love.Pub Date: April 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4500-6049-3
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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