A personality-driven, authoritative, sometimes circuitous work.
Three loosely connected essays by Threepenny Review founder and author Lesser (The Pagoda in the Garden, 2005) explore her concern with the connection between art and experience.
A recent trip to Berlin, Germany, informs these three reflections by Lesser, a self-described atheist and secular Jew who never expected in her lifetime to set foot in Germany. As a fellow in 2003 at the American Academy in Berlin, Lesser overcame her aversion to things German and writes in the first essay, “Out of Berlin,” of her recognition of how deeply Jewish the city still is, especially in terms of its passion for art and culture. The rigorous self-examination undergone by Germans since World War II suggests “a nation of people who are very much alive to their own capacity for unforgivable behavior.” And this darkness attracts Lesser, who, at 51, is at the “Mittelweg” of her life and prone to feelings of regret, as she delineates more fully in the last essay, “Difficult Friends,” about the recent death by cancer of her dear friend, writer Leonard Michaels. Sharing with Lenny, as she calls him, a quick temper and little moderation for passions, she quarreled often with him during the years of their long friendship over issues of loyalty. In the end, his death robbed her of a sizable part of her intellectual life at Berkeley, where she lives. The middle essay, however, is the most toothsome, examining her failure to write her intended book about Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose work she first encountered at Cambridge 25 years ago. A kindred figure and fellow atheist until the end, Hume strikes her as “someone to be carried through life as a sort of talisman against non-sense.” Although she shares his literary bent and admires his personal benevolence toward others, his class snobbery dooms him.
A personality-driven, authoritative, sometimes circuitous work.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-42400-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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