Johnston is a master of understatement wringing honest nostalgic emotion from simple declarative sentences. Here he offers a...
A beguiling combination of family history and autobiography, this first nonfiction work from Ontario novelist Johnston (The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, 1999) forms a revealing appendage to his own fictional works.
We are given the experiences of three generations of Johnstons in a carefully shaped narrative that blends together chronological history, the adult Johnston’s backward looks at his own childhood, and fictionalized reconstructions of quietly climactic moments in the lives of Johnston’s paternal grandfather Charlie and father Art. The former was a blacksmith and fisherman in “Ferryland,” the original name of the colony founded in the 1620s by England’s Lord Baltimore (the site of whose mansion, long since destroyed, is still sought by archaeologists and scholars). Art was a better educated, more opinionated sort who went away to college vowing to escape the hardships that had claimed Charlie, but ended up a “fish-preoccupied, fish-infatuated man” who would become a federal fisheries inspector. Their episodic stories are unified by the Johnstons’ (most especially Art’s) ongoing hatred of the “Confederation” (with mainland Canada, accomplished in 1947) and its avatar—the resourceful politician Joseph Smallwood—a theme echoed in such vivid sequences as young Wayne’s train journey across the province (in protest against “the first trans-island paved road” and the advent of buses) and a wistful description of the author’s leavetaking from home (for college, and the hope of becoming a writer). The book climaxes with Johnston’s movingly imagined re-creation of the “final days,” during which Charlie and Art separately (and dourly) await the dawning of Confederation, and with it the loss of their country’s independence and their awareness of their own powerlessness and mortality.
Johnston is a master of understatement wringing honest nostalgic emotion from simple declarative sentences. Here he offers a rich display of the rhetorical skills and heartfelt cultural recall that make his novels so enchanting and rewarding.Pub Date: June 16, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-50031-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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 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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