Nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, very much the way Bowles would have wanted it.
Blinkered by the friendship she developed with her subject over the last ten years of his life, academic biographer Carr (Dos Passos, 1984, etc.) presents a one-sided and less than reliable account of America’s supreme decadent genius.
Her narrative runs through Bowles’s long life (1910–99) at breakneck speed, virtually ignoring the 26 years after wife Jane’s death. Born in Queens, only child of a rather unserious mother and an authoritarian father he abhorred, Bowles was single-minded and almost cold-blooded about his life’s pursuit: to leave home and travel, meet as many people as he could to help him along, and become a poet and musician. He had startling early success: his poems were published in transition while still in high school; he obtained an introduction to study with Aaron Copland, who became his patron and perhaps the love of his life; and he developed important friendships with Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams, and numerous influential others. Supporting himself by writing incidental compositions for the theater, Bowles traveled to Morocco largely for the cheap availability of homosexual sex and hashish. In 1937 he met sheltered virgin Jane Auer, who “considered him a threat to her lesbianism” but married him to placate her mother. The couple lived and worked often in harmonious separation until her 1973 death from drug and alcohol abuse. Carr deeply mines Bowles’s childhood and early years as a spokesman for non-Western music; her account of his initial success as a novelist (The Sheltering Sky, inspired by Jane’s writing) moves blithely and is chock-full of encounters with famous musicians and belletrists. But she has enmeshed herself so exclusively in her subject that she fails to offer a sense of the compelling currents of the day—modernism, surrealism, existentialism, all important to Bowles—except as dates and names. Consequently, this is useful only to those who already have a working knowledge of his life.
Nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, very much the way Bowles would have wanted it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-684-19657-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
