A version better suited to young adult readers suckled on lots of telly.
The classic Greek tales retold as smoldering, campy romance.
Attempting to “visualize how legends were formed,” Spivey (Classics/Cambridge Univ.; The Ancient Olympics, 2004, etc.) offers a glimpse of the ancient Greek characters straight out of Central Casting. He eschews the decorous depictions of Homer and stately comeliness of Ovid’s shape-shifters in favor of a skirt-hitching Eurydice and cleavage-spilling Hera who jump off the page and into the reader’s lap. The author picks and chooses from the mythological repertoire. From myths of the “early childhood of the world,” marked by the chaos and violence of Kronos and Gaia’s family drama, he moves to Hades’ snatching of radiant Persephone while mother Demeter mourns. Then it’s on to the great deeds of cracking action-figures Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, Jason and the Argonauts, followed by the judgment of languorous shepherd Paris that precipitates the Trojan War. After an abbreviated account of the travels and hard-won homecoming of Odysseus, it all concludes spiffily with a wrap-up of the ghastly turn of the House of Atreus. Spivey takes tensely dramatic moments and renders them in laughable dialogue: When good-natured goon Herakles strides through the brambles on his way to tackling the Nemean lion, he notes, “I don’t want any scratches”; after the sacking of Troy, Helen remarks to her waylaid husband Menelaus, hammering away at her chains, “I didn’t know you cared—so much.” Considering the alluring outfit of each of the three goddesses who vie for his favor—Athena clad in high-heeled hunting boots and “little else except for a military-style corselet”—Paris enjoys a Harlequin moment: “Aphrodite let the tip of her tongue flicker over his earlobe. Paris shuddered. He knew what desire was.” Entertaining stuff, granted, but is it necessary to so raucously redraft the ancient tales rather than direct readers back to the reliable original singers?
A version better suited to young adult readers suckled on lots of telly.Pub Date: June 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-26663-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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