The author’s recollection of the love he found and left in Napoli, artfully told.
A reverie of Hofstadter’s days in Campania is evoked in vibrantly loving terms by the smitten reporter (The Love Affair as a Work of Art, 1996, etc.).
For every tourist to Naples, the view of the blue gulf shimmering in the sunshine, Vesuvius in the mist, may be unforgettable. But that’s not what this book is about. Somehow lodged under the rubric of nonfiction, this is no more a travel book about Naples than Death in Venice is a guide to the old city on the Adriatic lagoon. As Hofstadter’s subtitle suggests, it’s a romance with a felicitous setting and a characteristic supporting cast. In the background, there are the roaring Vespas and the busy piazzas, the tripe “dripping over the tripe altars,” the lotto-betting and the colorful native Neapolitans. There’s Donato, the wedding photographer; Luca, the hustler with his inflatable crèche; Michele and Salvatore, the geographers of subterranean Naples; Gigi, the stuttering actor; Gennaro, the radio soothsayer. Co-starring with the author, who takes the classic role of ex-pat writer, is mysterious, fetching Benedetta. The story he tells of their transitory reunion after a three-year hiatus is relayed with a cinematic attraction. Chapter headings (“The Letter,” “Signora Perna and the Other World,” “Benedetta in Springtime”) are redolent of his tale, which, in truth, fits somewhere in the literary twilight betwixt factual personal history and engaging fictive memory.
The author’s recollection of the love he found and left in Napoli, artfully told.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41440-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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
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