Will appeal to Hemingway enthusiasts and readers of literary biography.
A mostly engaging examination of a marriage and its effect on American literature.
In addition to the detailed story of Ernest Hemingway’s second marriage, to Pauline Pfeiffer, Arkansas State University administrator Hawkins covers the novelist’s other marriages, the tense relationship Pfeiffer and Hemingway navigated after their divorce, their deaths and more. Pfeiffer met Hemingway in Paris. Though the relationship had a rocky start, the two fell in love, resulting in the end of Hemingway’s first marriage. The next 13 years were filled with travel, children and Hemingway’s rising career, all considerably bolstered by Pfeiffer family money. Hawkins pays special attention to this financial aspect of the story, arguing that money was at the very least an important factor, and probably the main one, in Hemingway’s decision to marry Pfeiffer. Regardless, the book shows Pfeiffer as a woman in love and content with her marriage and life until her husband moved on to be with someone else. Most of the narrative is absorbing, but Hawkins occasionally becomes bogged down in the details. Genealogies of both the Pfeiffer and Hemingway clans slow the pace, as do occasional off-topic anecdotes that may intrigue Hemingway enthusiasts but distract from the subject at hand. Though she paints Hemingway in a somewhat unflattering light, Hawkins doesn’t ignore his better qualities and includes episodes showing his soft, generous side when dealing with family and those close friends with whom he maintained lasting relationships.
Will appeal to Hemingway enthusiasts and readers of literary biography.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55728-974-2
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Univ. of Arkansas
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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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