A somewhat sanitized portrait; Duncan might have preferred something bolder.
Cartoonist Jones takes an admiring glance at the truncated life and roller-coaster times of the woman who traversed three continents to revolutionize dance.
Denounced as everything from a “wild voluptuary” to a “jumping Jezebel,” Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) famously remarked, “People do not live nowadays. They get about 10 percent out of life.” Every page of this admiring graphic biography reminds readers that the American dance pioneer herself always got 100 percent. The thin volume depicts a number of turbulent scenes from Duncan’s personal and professional experiences, underscoring the frenetic exuberance with which she conducted her many affairs. With bold strokes and supple lettering, Jones’s pen-and-ink drawings attempt to animate Duncan’s boundary-smashing style, onstage and off: as the barefoot, tunic-clad artist whose free-flowing movements transformed classical dance, and as the convention-defying single mother of two and very public lover of famous figures and political causes. “With this book, I’m asking a generation in flip-flops to imagine how traffic stopped when Isadora strolled down 5th Avenue in her homemade sandals,” writes Jones. It’s difficult to extract the truth about Duncan’s life, the author acknowledges, from the diverse, often contradictory accounts supplied in the dancer’s writings, reminiscences by her contemporaries and biographies with various agendas. Jones’s portrait depicts a gifted artist driven by a passion to realize at whatever cost her feminist vision of the dancer of the future: “woman in her purest expression, body and soul in harmony, emerging from centuries of civilized forgetfulness, no longer at war with spirituality—the highest intelligence in the freest body.” Interestingly, although Jones espouses Duncan’s unabashed belief that “to expose is art, to conceal is vulgar,” and doesn’t shy away from depicting the great tragedies of her subject’s life, she tends to suggest rather than explicitly spell out the dancer’s more controversial actions: dalliances with women, numerous suicide attempts, proclivity for public drunkenness.
A somewhat sanitized portrait; Duncan might have preferred something bolder.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9497-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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