Despite an annoying fondness for rhetorical questions and barely serviceable prose, Noiville gets the story told, and...
The life of the late, great Yiddish writer (1904–91), as analyzed by a French journalist and recalled by Singer’s relatives, friends, translators, biographers, critics and literary peers.
Noiville leans heavily on both Singer’s lucid autobiographies and the testimony of such witnesses in depicting the odyssey of a deeply conflicted Jew whose experience of his family’s zealous religiosity and the terrors of two world wars estranged him from his origins. The roots of his complicated sensibility are shown to lie in insistent memories of his fervent (and somewhat ridiculous) rabbi father, powerful pragmatic mother, elder sister Hinde Esther (herself a novelist) and especially his older brother Israel Joshua, a bestselling author who paved the way for his younger sibling’s eventual literary conquest of America (to which Isaac immigrated in 1945). Noiville stresses Singer’s fascination with Jewish folklore and supernaturalism, persuasively linking it to his indifference to religious tradition and his dispassionate fatalism—traits that, when expressed in his fiction, offended Jewish intellectuals far more preoccupied than he with their people’s communal experience of persecution, diaspora and genocide. (The apostate’s lifelong womanizing, indifferent fatherhood and calculating career moves were also frowned upon.) Yet Singer came unforgettably into his own in richly imagined tales of imps and dybbuks, ingenuous everymen and satanic tempters, faithful spouses and cynical adulterers: a roiling gallery of clamoring humanity captured in fabulist stories (“Gimpel the Fool,” “The Spinoza of Market Street”), breathlessly readable novels (The Magician of Lublin, Enemies) and the still-underrated serial autobiography begun with the brilliant In My Father’s Court. Still, dualities and contradictions plagued him to the end, climaxing with a 1978 Nobel Prize, universal adulation and his sad final years endured in the bewildering grip of Alzheimer’s disease.
Despite an annoying fondness for rhetorical questions and barely serviceable prose, Noiville gets the story told, and Singer’s is a good, dark, paradoxical one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-17800-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
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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