A work of piercing loveliness and sadness, an inquiry into the meaning and significance of life, from Pulitzer-winner Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1972; The Living, 1992; etc.). Early on in her inquiry, Dillard quotes St. Augustine: “We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God.” It is this dilemma, the incomprehensibility of God and our profound need to understand, that underlie this graceful examination of the big questions—life and death, good and evil, the source of holiness. Dillard considers these cosmic issues by looking at the particular, whether a blue crab spied in the desert or a newborn being bathed and swaddled by a nurse. Agilely, Dillard weaves together several narrative threads that seem disparate but that through the poetry of her thought and style come together into an Ecclesiastes-like series of examinations. A thread called “Sand” follows paleontologist and religious thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin through his long exile to China and the journey on which he discovered Peking Man. And “China” is set during the author’s own trip to the East, when she witnessed the unearthing of thousands of statues, an army of clay soldiers dating back 2,200 years and intended to guard the grave of the ancient Emperor Q—in. These soldiers represent the might of the great emperor—but in Dillard’s delicate inquiry, they come also to represent his cruelty and by extension the cruelty of tyrants throughout history and, by further extension, all calamities, even natural, that have befallen humankind. “Seeing the broad earth under the open sky,” she writes of the clay army, “and a patch of it sliced deep into corridors from which bodies emerge, surprised many people to tears. Who would not weep from shock? I seemed to see our lives from the aspect of eternity, I seemed long dead and looking down.” One of those very rare works that will bear rereading and rereading again, each time revealing something new of itself.
Pub Date: March 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40380-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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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