After deferential personal reminiscences and a hostile authorized biography, Frost is finally portrayed here as equally complex in both his poetry and his personality. Although Lawrance Thompson's detail-drenched three-volume authorized biography stripped Frost of his folksy public persona, it not only nakedly displayed, in Meyers's words, ``a pathological hatred'' toward its subject, but also concealed Thompson's affair with Kay Morrison, Frost's secretary, literary executor, and lover. Biographies by Sidney Cox and Elizabeth Sergeant have been more benevolent, and Frost's editor Stanley Burnshaw has attacked Thompson's objectivity. Drawing on all of this work, prolific biographer Meyers (Edmund Wilson, 1995, etc.) depicts Frost as an incompetent farmer and a wayward student, but an innovative teacher and a canny and erudite poet, as adept in versification as in literary rivalry. The most amusing sections deal with Frost's serio-comic relations with other poets, such as Ezra Pound, with whom Frost quarrelled in England before his (Frost's) first success, then helped to bail out of the insane asylum; Carl Sandburg, who was Frost's rival for all-American poetic simplicity; and T.S. Eliot, who started as a Modernist competitor but ended as a fellow grand old man of letters. Frost's personal life receives close but compassionate scrutiny, for if Meyers paints Frost as a demanding husband and domineering paterfamilias, he allows him grief for the series of family tragedies that darkened his famous later years. Frost ends as a model of his hero, Thomas Hardy, revered and still productive, but Meyers underscores the aged Frost's pessimism and desperate need for recognition. That need led him from ``barding about'' on the lecture circuit to the Kennedy inauguration and good-will visits abroad. Notwithstanding a certain critical padding and occasional harshness, Meyers's biography gives a readable, sympathetic portrait of Frost without sacrificing either the dark poet or the affable public New Englander. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 8, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-72809-6
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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