A detailed if donnish biography of Edgar Snow, the Missouri- born reporter who became one of the West's ranking authorities on strife-torn China during the 1930s. While the work at hand suffers by comparison with Robert M. Farnsworth's vivid book (page TKTK) so far as the wayfaring correspondent's time in the Far East is concerned, this text offers a more complete account of its subject's early and later years. Relying on much the same sources as his fellow scholar, historian Thomas (Labor and the Chinese Revolution,not reviewed) tracks Snow from his Kansas City boyhood to young adulthood as an ad agency apprentice in Manhattan and beyond. Having chucked advertising for a working tour of the Global Village, the would-be travel writer (then 23) began what he believed was a brief Shanghai sojourn in 1928. With time out for trips to neighboring Asian lands, however, Snow did not leave China until early 1941. In the interim, he established himself as a top-drawer annalist of people, places, and events throughout the Middle Kingdom. More an implacable foe of imperialism than a man of the left, Snow gained the confidence of the Communists who were to make China's revolution. His perceptive portrayal of their travails and vaultingly ambitious aspirations in Red Star Over China (1937) earned him a worldwide reputation but not much money. Although Snow (a prolific diarist and letter writer) went on to produce more books and file important stories from abroad, his life did not have much of a second act. Thomas provides telling particulars on Snow's evanescent career and redeemingly happy personal life during the Cold War era. He also recounts the brief, bittersweet professional revival the expatriate enjoyed just before his death in 1972 by virtue of the minor role he played in President Nixon's breakthrough mission to Peking. A solid, occasionally stolid, contribution to the Snow canon. (29 b&w illustrations, 1 map, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-520-20276-7
Page Count: 587
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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