A fine book about books that will appeal to readers of Manguel’s previous work.
Graceful essays on books, reading, and the subversive possibilities of ideas.
Late in this gathering of occasional pieces, Manguel (A History of Reading, 1996, etc.) takes issue with Auden’s famous pronouncement that poetry makes nothing happen. “I don’t believe that to be true,” Manguel writes. “Not every book is an epiphany, but many times we have sailed guided by a luminous page or beacon of verse.” Generous in his praise of life-changing books, Manguel notes his own epiphanies, from discovering the horrible power of anti-Semitism as a child in Argentina (where, he tells us, he used to read aloud to the blind writer Jorge Luis Borges) to exploring the almost-occult history of gay literature. Some of Manguel’s essays will send thoughtful readers to the shelves to seek out underappreciated writers, such as G.K. Chesterton (whom Manguel praises for his humor and vigorous prose) and Mario Vargas Llosa (the Peruvian novelist and sometime politician whom Manguel does not hesitate to label one of the 20th century’s greats). Some of these pieces, crafted as introductions, magazine articles, and talks, are slight, some even peevish—such as Manguel’s diatribe against Anglo-American book editors (“Before going out into the world, every writer of fiction in North America and most of the Commonwealth acquires, as it were, a literary back-seat driver”). But most are well-considered celebrations of the pleasures of culture, from museum-going to walking the streets of a major capital, from turning the pages of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles to finding an unanticipated ally in a writer one has newly discovered.
A fine book about books that will appeal to readers of Manguel’s previous work.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-15-601265-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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