Brevity may be the soul of wit, but biography often deserves a little bit more.
A slender biography of English composer Vaughan Williams that pays more attention to the music than the man.
Heffer (Moral Desperado, 1996) recounts the trajectory of Williams’s life with the broadest of strokes: a mere four pages cover the period between the composer’s birth and his enrollment at the Royal College of Music. This is indicative of the author’s deeper focus on Williams’s music and compositions rather than the quotidian experiences of his life. Although the author portrays Williams as a most genial and humane man, one who volunteered his services in both world wars and treated his friends (such as fellow composer Gustav Holst) generously, intimate—or even interesting—details about his personal life are in short supply. Rather, Heffer traces the interconnections between his subject’s music and the traditions of English folksong. Resisting the sway of Germanic influence, we are told, Williams’s compositions articulate a distinctly English voice, and this musical theme became a personal manifesto. He spoke widely on the virtues of a nationalistic voice in music, most notably in a series of lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College and later published as National Music (1935). Heffer also details the influence that various writers and poets had on Williams, including John Skelton, Paul Bunyan, Walt Whitman, and A.E. Housman. Williams’s career was much lauded during his lifetime, and he was honored with the University of Bristol’s first honorary doctorate of music and the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of the Arts. So very much happened in this man’s life that the scantiness of Heffer’s account will leave the majority of the composer's fans hungry for more. This frustratingly slim volume concludes with a select discography of Williams’s works.
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but biography often deserves a little bit more.Pub Date: April 6, 2001
ISBN: 1-55553-427-4
Page Count: 152
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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