If you skip the preaching to the choir and the film-school analysis, Louvish’s wide-eyed love for his subjects’ simple,...
A fan’s gleeful, if excessive, double-take on the beloved bumblers of silent and talking picture fame, seeing their prodigious pile of slapstick misadventures as high art.
Novelist and London International Film School teacher Louvish continues his biographical exploration of the kings of American film comedy (Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, 1997, etc.) with a sprightly, sympathetic dual biography of the rotund, fastidious Georgia-born Oliver Norvell Hardy and his thin, feckless British sidekick, Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who legally adopted his vaudeville stage name of Stanley Laurel in 1931 after the duo’s two-reelers made for Hal Roach’s Culver City studio gathered world-wide fame. Louvish sees the pair’s comedy as bright flotsam in a historical gush starting with ancient Greece and coming up to Chaplin mentor Fred Karno (Laurel understudied for Chaplin) and to Laurel’s father, English theater owner and sketch writer Arthur Jefferson. Eager fan clubs that have named themselves after the duo’s spoof of the Sons of Desert masonic, have generated a stack of scholarly volumes that Louvish eagerly credits while offering some deathless revelations: Hardy offended his mother by marrying a Jew; Laurel’s comic inventiveness was rooted in older music-hall and vaudeville routines; the off-screen Hardy wasn’t quite the passive foil of Laurel’s fussy genius; and the outsize harridans wielding rolling-pins in the films were based on the pair’s exploitative studio bosses and on a string of mostly unhappy marriages (Hardy had three wives, Laurel five). Louvish lets his spotlight wander, as he did with Margaret Dumont in his Marx Brothers biography, Monkey Business (2000), by detailing the mostly unfulfilled lives of supporting actors, such as the bald and manically antagonistic Jimmy Finlayson.
If you skip the preaching to the choir and the film-school analysis, Louvish’s wide-eyed love for his subjects’ simple, forthright, and hardworking desire to please will bring down the house. (Filmography and 52 b&w photos)Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-26651-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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