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
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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