A rewarding read about the inner workings of an artistic mind—solid fare for Hemingway enthusiasts looking for a fresh...
A unique biography of Ernest Hemingway’s World War II experience.
At first glance, Hemingway’s decision to volunteer to hunt for German U-boats threatening mercantile ships in the Gulf Stream can be easily absorbed into the author’s tough-guy image, especially considering that the Pilar was a fishing boat on which he could drink and boss other men around on the Navy’s dime. Yet former Navyman Mort’s portrait is far more nuanced. The author views these patrols as a synthesis of life and art, arguing that Hemingway embodied his own existential “Hemingway Hero” during these hunts—or quests, as Hemingway himself preferred to call them. It was this quest that would shape much of Santiago’s saga in The Old Man and the Sea—and, to a lesser extent, Islands in the Stream. At times Mort’s analysis of Hemingway’s words and deeds is overly sympathetic, but his inclusion of Martha Gellhorn’s correspondence adds a welcome perspective on this complicated man. While the information specifically relating to Hemingway’s time aboard the Pilar is stretched quite thin, Mort is strongest in his discussions of boats, the naval history of the period and the mechanics of the elusive U-boat—so strong, in fact, that Hemingway’s quest occasionally takes a back seat to the grander maritime developments of the period. But Mort ably establishes the earnestness at the heart of Hemingway’s quixotic adventure, which was rooted in his deep desire to serve his country and underscored by the unique opportunity to live his art.
A rewarding read about the inner workings of an artistic mind—solid fare for Hemingway enthusiasts looking for a fresh perspective.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9786-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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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