Steadily intelligent, musically aware, sympathetic but objective life of the wife and goddess of Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, novelist Franz Werfel, and a handful of geniuses who loved her unstintedly. Keegan's Alma Mahler towers above Francoise Giroud's recent Alma Mahler or the Art of Being Loved (p. 30), which was a brief but empty exercise. This biography from journalist Keegan (wife of historian John Keegan) is finely researched, more than twice as long as Giroux's, packed with rich cultural detail, and gives a far more complex and redoubtable Alma. As daughter of Emil Schindler, an excellent Viennese landscape artist, Alma breathed art and artists. A songwriter, she early chose a destiny as love-goddess to geniuses, allowing herself to be adored, kissed, and who knows what else by many rising composers, usually teachers twice her age. Emil died while Alma was still young, and her aging suitors were dad's replacements. So when she met 40-year-old Mahler, she found the daddy of her dreams, surrendered before marriage—a big thing in those days—and went to the altar pregnant. Gustav demanded she give up songwriting, one composer in the household being enough, and devote herself to him. This regimen took strongly, and Alma gave Gustav more attention than she did their children. But, feeling neglected during Mahler's working hours as Vienna's great opera director and leading cultural figure, she wandered, came back, wandered more. During her third marriage, to Werfel, she made it clear to him that he could never be a great German writer since he was Jewish—then made sure he wrote moneymakers, including the ``Catholic'' novel The Song of Bernadette. A classy woman—even as an old fatty hooked on benedictine. (Eight pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-80513-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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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