An opinionated, if somewhat professorial, collection of essays on French art and literature by the Booker Prize—winning novelist and art historian. Before Brookner had ever penned Hotel du Lac or any other work of fiction, she wrote about Watteau, Greuze, GÇricault, and David. The essays collected here were written during the past quarter-century and published originally in the Times Literary Supplement or the London Review of Books. Although no one could call these pieces spellbinding, they—re written with a suave clarity and subtle wit. In counterpoint to heavily theoretical art history, Brookner allows herself a novelist’s pleasure in biographical detail. From a traditional perspective, unabashed interpolation of art and life may be fraught with danger, but Brookner never abandons her intellectual rigor or critical distance. She just closes in on her subjects with an ardent curiosity. Thanks, perhaps, to her work as a writer of fiction, her essays on 18th- and 19th-century art and literature benefit from her sensitivity to the interplay of philosophy, politics, culture, social change, and personality. Time and again, she focuses on tensions evident in the work itself, as well as in the creator. Her essay on Delacroix, for example, explores the dual threads of Classicism and Romanticism—restraint and self-revelation—that remain visible in his writing, if not in his art. When she keeps to art history, Brookner’s proclamations amuse and inform; unfortunately, she also veers into contemporary subjects. It’s anyone’s guess why she chose to toss in a piece about Diana Trilling’s book on the trial of Jean Harris, for example. The cumulative effect of Brookner’s critical boldness is less heavy-handed and overbearing than fiercely, even warmly pedagogical. (3 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1998
ISBN: 1-86046-388-6
Page Count: 214
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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