A rollicking good tale that effectively illustrates the level of marital entrapment endured by women of the Georgian era.
A sprightly feminist biography of a British heiress.
Mary Eleanor Bowes (1749–1800) was the only child of the enormously wealthy George Bowes, owner of abundant coal deposits in County Durham and Yorkshire. She was educated by a slew of tutors and earned the admiration of her doting father, who died when she was 11, leaving the young girl under the lax attention of aunts. As the idea of marrying for love was gaining currency—and there was nobody to check her impulses—Mary Eleanor first married John Lyon, the handsome, reserved older ninth Earl of Strathmore, with whom she had little in common. After effectively signing over her family’s properties to him, he ran up ruinous debts before leaving her a widow before the age of 30, with five children. Less than a year later, she was essentially duped into believing that an ardent admirer and cunning Irish opportunist, Andrew Robinson Stoney, fought a duel over her and lay dying; recklessly, she married him in 1777. Despite a miraculous recovery, Stoney proved to be a libertine, gambler, crook, wife-beater and all-around villain who made Mary Eleanor’s life hell for nearly a decade. Moore (The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery, 2005) vividly demonstrates that despite enjoying every material advantage, Mary Eleanor was virtually imprisoned and disenfranchised in her two marriages. The author skillfully chronicles her ultimate escape and vindication through the courts, emphasizing how the Bowes’ sensational divorce case paved the way for the reform of divorce and custody laws in England.
A rollicking good tale that effectively illustrates the level of marital entrapment endured by women of the Georgian era.Pub Date: March 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-38336-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
