Posthumous gathering of minor articles by Polish-American novelist Kosinski (1933-91). Kosinski is ever serious and sometimes wry in these pieces (reprinted from Vanity Fair, Esquire, The American Scholar, etc.), some of which are only a paragraph long or two or three pages. Few extend themselves, but those that do are the best. Even the more lighthearted ones, about Kosinski's obsessions with polo and skiing, tend to a kind of hard mind-body focus that analyzes "being there" as a skier or as a man on horseback. Kosinski, of course, is famed for The Painted Bird (still banned in Poland) and other works about his horrifying childhood under the Nazis, and for his elegies for Jewish culture wiped out in the Holocaust—especially for the disappearance of Jewish culture from Lodz, his hometown. That Jewish culture specific to Poland—the one country on earth where prewar Jews could develop and insulate themselves without fear of pogroms—has not reappeared, and Kosinski sees no Polish interest in bringing it back to bloom, a tragedy he calls a second Holocaust. Meanwhile, he's often drawn back to his brief ten-minute role in Warren Beatty's Reds, which he views from several different angles. He doesn't like his highly praised acting, expresses no desire to go on as an actor in the collective artistic labor that is filmmaking, and regrets that his hero Chauncey Gardiner, of Being There, must now he thought of by most readers only as Peter Sellers, who played Chauncey in the film version. Most involving here are pieces on Kosinski's rarified fictional strategies behind The Painted Bird and Steps. Despite his intellectuality, Kosinski is not a gripping essayist—though there are some raisins in the cake.
Pub Date: Nov. 23, 1992
ISBN: 0802134238
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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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