Saint Genet's posthumous last book, a semi-surreal record of years spent with the Black Panthers in the US and with Palestinian soldiers in Jordan and Lebanon. With his celebrated literary career long abandoned, Genet (1910-86), a homosexual ex-convict and castoff son of a whore, sought a strange kind of sainthood he could never achieve, one that embraced thieves and traitors. He began involving himself with marginal political groups in the late 1960's; these groups, he felt, kept him wrapped in the outcast state that he felt most warmed by. But however great his sympathies, he never surrendered his intellectual freedom and saw gaps in the groups' vague political programs. He loved, rather, individual fighters and here lists their virtues as proof of his love. As Edmund White says in his brilliant introduction, ``Love reconciles Genet's feelings that everyone is of equal value and that each person is priceless....Emotions live on and only the people who entertain them die. `The happiness of my hand in the hair of a boy another hand will know, already knows, and if I die this happiness will go on.' '' For fun, Genet accepted an invitation to spend a few days with the Palestinians—and stayed nearly two years. He tells no story here, leaps from one land to another while telescoping space and time, giving us perhaps the most intimate picture of terrorism ever written. Among the Panthers, terror is spectacle and theater, and what change the group brings about in fighting Nixon and white imperialism is through poetry. ``At the beginning of 1970 the Party still had both the suppleness and rigidity of a male sex organ: and it preferred erections to elections.'' The crazy logic of the Palestinian phenomenon offers a broader, bloodier canvas as Genet writes under medical notice of his imminent death and seeks life in his nightmares and memories. Unfinished, provisional, inspired—and it may be updated when the original manuscript is found. Ringing with eloquence and intelligence.
Pub Date: April 24, 1992
ISBN: 0-8195-5246-1
Page Count: 398
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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