A worthwhile read, but expect nothing new on this saint.
A biography of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380).
Huffington Post senior editor Emling (Marie Curie and Her Daughters: The Private Lives of Science’s First Family, 2012, etc.) offers an interesting and readable, though otherwise unremarkable, biography of St. Catherine, who entered the world in a time of violence, plague, and religious unrest. From her earliest years, Catherine showed an uncanny piety and devotion to her faith and to the established Catholic Church. She had her first vision of Christ at age 6, committed herself to a vow of virginity at age 7, and was regularly fasting soon after. Her life of 33 years would be marked by extreme self-denial—she often existed only on the Eucharist—and almost pathological desires for physical suffering and martyrdom. While barely in her 20s, Catherine jumped fully into the church politics of her day, encouraging the pope to vacate Avignon, France, and return to Rome and encouraging a crusade against Islam. Unfortunately, Emling does not confront the rather obvious question of how an uneducated woman in a thoroughly patriarchal world managed to address the political issues of her day and even win the admiration and devotion of popes and other leaders. Catherine managed to do the seemingly impossible in the course of only a few years, and yet the author presents her remarkable influence without asking how it occurred. Similarly, Emling’s portrayal of Catherine is entirely uncritical, even to the point of being fawning. The author fails to pose obvious questions about Catherine’s mental health and the veracity of contemporary sources. There is no doubt that general readers will find the book fascinating in many ways: Catherine lived a remarkable life and left an interesting story. However, Emling relies on the work of prior writers and offers little new in terms of either original research or unique approach.
A worthwhile read, but expect nothing new on this saint.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-137-27980-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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