An absorbing resurrection of English worldviews widely held during the mid-1800s: strangely entertaining and surprisingly...
Equal-opportunity bigot Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer (1802–78) takes a trip around the world, in a collection of excerpts from guides originally written for Victorian children.
One day while browsing in a bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard, freelance magazine writer/editor Pruzan stumbled across Mortimer’s work and, in a moment of inspired literary archeology, took it home to chuckle over its phrasings and outlook with friends and family. From those serendipitous beginnings, he became increasingly fascinated with the foul-tempered Mortimer. She turned out to be a British bestselling children’s author, and although in her entire life she never traveled beyond Paris, Brussels and Edinburgh, she presented herself as an authority on all the cultures of the world. Here, Pruzan provides highlights from three of her works: The Countries of Europe Described; Far Off: Asia and Australia Described, and Far Off, Part II: Africa and America Described, all published between 1849 and 1854. Explanatory text at the beginning of each section describes relevant contemporary political and social events, a very useful bit if context, particularly for such countries as Tartary, Circassia and Prussia. No land escapes Mortimer’s acid pen, though she has a few kind words for Denmark—whose chief asset is its resemblance to England. Of the whole of Africa, she declares, “There are more ignorant people there than anywhere else.” In Asia, she notes that “the Chinese are very selfish and unfeeling.” After all this bile, it’s intriguing to arrive at her thoughts on the American South, particularly slavery. Mortimer observes that although some people say that slaves are happy to labor as they do, “the slaves show plainly that they do not think themselves happy, by often running away.”
An absorbing resurrection of English worldviews widely held during the mid-1800s: strangely entertaining and surprisingly educational.Pub Date: June 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-504-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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
IN THE NEWS
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
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