Of two biographies of Henry Miller to be published in the same month (see Robert Ferguson's Henry Miller, below), this is the easier, more flowing read, though not necessarily the better book. Both Dearborn and Ferguson will the same story from the same sympathetic viewpoint, with Ferguson giving greater detail, a denser page, and more cultural scene-setting. One might fear that Dearborn (Love in the Promised Land, 1988; Pocahontas's Daughters, 1985) will do a feminist hatchet job on the freewheeling satyr whose novels shooed in the sexual revolution (at least in print), but she remains open-spirited about Miller's seeing women in his novels—aside from his second wife, June—as so many vaginas. Dearborn indeed makes clear that Miller suffered heavily from a domineering Nordic mother and wives who victimized him, so much so that he barely knew a woman who wasn't a towering sneak or double-dealer. We follow him through his Brooklyn childhood and early failures as an unpublished novelist; his famed five years as a hiring-and-firing manager for Western Union; the explosively bloody crucifixion of his marriage to June ``Smith'' (born Juliet Edith Smerth); his bottom-dog decade of poverty in Paris that produced his greatest works (aside from Plexus), the shift of real-life, sex-hungry Henry Miller into his novels' fantasy hero, the endlessly priapic ``Henry Miller''; his years of begging in the wilderness of California's Big Sur country; the belated publication of his Tropic novels, banned in the States for 25 years after their first printings in Paris; his fight against being known as the ``King of Smut''—and his hopeless ties with later wives and man-eaters. Dearborn aptly compares Miller's literary life to Walt Whitman's, thinks that sex was an element in his writing that was ``a red herring that misled his readers for years. The theme of his greatest books is survival.'' Smooth, warm, and commendable.
Pub Date: May 8, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-67704-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© 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.
