A real-life Beauty and the Beast. Only in de Borchgrave's breathless memoir, the male lead isn't a monster with a noble soul but a nobleman with a monstrous soul—and the love scenes are strictly adults-only. In 1977, the author (nÇe Heller), a young Barnard graduate living a ``fast-track'' life in Manhattan, falls into a gothic romance: ``I was aware of the tall, handsome man in the [airplane] seat next to me...telling me that he was Jacques de Borchgrave''- -a.k.a. Baron de Borchgrave, son of one of Belgium's noblest families. Before long, Sheri is sharing the baron's suite in St. Tropez, succumbing to his sweet nothings: ``Now that I've seen your body on the beach, your soft curves...I want to caress those curves...Sheri, I desire you furiously.'' The castles and a life of indolent luxury don't turn off Sheri, either, and soon she's tying the knot, despite reservations—especially about the breast- enlargement surgery that Jacques insists she have. When Sheri postpones the surgery, the baron explodes in a rage, but calms down long enough for her to learn that she's only the latest of several women he's planned to mutate into a Stepford wife. It takes months longer to learn of his yen for sex games—revealed as Sheri watches a nude swimming party devolve into an orgy; catches the baron in bed with his sister; and is coerced into having sex with three women at once. But Jacques has such impeccable manners (``His expertise and elegance in handling utensils was like great theater'') that it's going to take more—like rages that verge on homicidal mania—for her to split. Ironically, the baron puts a bullet into his head before a divorce comes through, and now Sheri is a baroness for life. For a blue-blooded bodice-ripping morality tale, this isn't half bad. (Photos—not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1993
ISBN: 0-525-93637-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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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