Of much interest to Russia hands, as well as admirers of Tolstaya’s fiction.
Critical pieces (most for the New York Review of Books) that add up to a highly opinionated, irony-laced view of life and art in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
Born in 1951, fiction-writer Tolstaya (Sleepwalker in a Fog, 1992, etc.) bears a distinguished pedigree: her grandfather was the Stalin-era novelist Alexei Tolstoy, while another forebear was the Tolstoy of War and Peace fame. This exalted lineage afforded her and her family a degree of protection from the irrationalities, often murderous, of Soviet politics, about which she has much to say in these pages. Reviewing Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, for instance, she remarks that Lenin hated the intelligentsia more than any other class, “and they were the first to be slaughtered,” precisely, she suggests, because they had a conscience and “were not indifferent to issues of social good”; strange it is, then, that so many intellectuals should esteem Lenin to this day. Assessing Gail Sheehy’s wide-eyed biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, she wryly notes that it does no good to wonder why Gorbachev should have told his people that he was a dedicated Communist while telling Margaret Thatcher that he was no longer one of the faithful, for such duplicity is of a piece with the Soviet pattern of rule, and no Russian would bat an eye on hearing of it. (Of Sheehy, she writes, perhaps unkindly, “There is not a trace of critical attitude toward her material.”) Writing of Boris Yeltsin’s time as president of Russia, during which the Western press was given to tongue-clucking over Yeltsin’s drinking and other moral failures, she reckons that it’s a good thing that “scandals of the Gary Hart–like variety leave us indifferent,” for had Yeltsin not thwarted the coup attempt of 1991, “Gorbachev would be dead, the cold war would be revived, Eastern Europe would be stained with blood, and Russian tanks would be in Berlin.” (And in any event, she adds, “a real Russian is always thinking about vodka.”) And so on, in acidic and always intelligent prose.
Of much interest to Russia hands, as well as admirers of Tolstaya’s fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-12500-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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