The world’s culture dissected, one cunning, bemused essay at a time.
A miscellany of essays, critiques, narrative explorations and diversions from a literary iconoclast.
These are shorter works by Tillman (Someday This Will Be Funny, 2011, etc.), but it’s a generous set, allowing one essay for each letter of the alphabet. The collection starts with a return to previous targets, as “The Last Words Are Andy Warhol” examines the little-known 1968 book a: A Novel using a shopping list as context for delving into Tillman’s beloved Warhol. “Nothing is Lost or Found: Desperately Seeking Paul and Jane Bowles” is a fond remembrance of the famously besotted writers. A little later, “White Cool” gives a heartbreaking flash of famed jazz musician Chet Baker. Tillman is a fantastic writer in long-form or short, and the exercise of turning that famous intellect on herself seems to make her more abrupt yet more focused. In “Try Again,” she discusses the creative process: “No one strong-arms you into becoming an artist or writer—most often you’re dissuaded—and volunteers who bemoan their chosen gig seem disingenuous. Visual artists are often called to account for their choices and asked to defend their positions. Few occupations other than finance, politics and crime entail this reckoning. Writers and artists may ask themselves why they make art or write, and many feel the pointlessness of their self-chosen jobs, but all rebuttals and answers to their existential questions rest on faith in Art or Literature. Faith itself will be tested.” The collection doesn’t even really serve as an introduction to Tillman’s work, although it certainly represents her wit. The most weighty piece here is “A Mole in the House of the Modern,” a piercing deconstruction of Edith Wharton. In short, it’s a nonessential pastiche of book reviews and other miscellaneous writings that reads less as a collage and more like someone handed you one drawer of a great writer’s file cabinet.
The world’s culture dissected, one cunning, bemused essay at a time.Pub Date: April 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935869-21-4
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Red Lemonade/Cursor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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