Our age's angsts distilled to a wrenching clarity by a writer who knows how to look—and what to look for.
French novelist/memoirist Ernaux (A Frozen Woman, 1995, etc.) turns conversations overheard and people and places observed into a disturbingly effective documentary record of modern life.
Moving outside Paris into one of those "new towns'' with fabricated city centers and enclosed malls featuring vast stores, Ernaux, trying to understand a place with no past, began keeping a journal. In it she "sought to describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer,'' trying always to avoid any subjective judgments or reactions, though, inevitably, some people or situations reminded her of her own life and family. A cool writer with an eye for the telling detail, Ernaux collected a variety of precise observations and insights in places as varied as a butcher shop and a Parisian lingerie boutique. Some of the entries, which begin in 1985 and end in 1992, are nearly a page long, others only one or two pithy sentences. Ernaux's France is a gritty, tough- minded place where superstores are the new cathedrals, subways have replaced commuter trains ("you enter Paris along underground tunnels, amid artificial lights, not knowing where you are''), and beggars offer a jarring contrast to the omnipresent consumerism. She watches people on the streets, in the stores, on the subway: a young woman unwrapping her purchases and happily admiring them; a homeless man unself-consciously examining his belly and adjusting his socks; and a mother and daughter in sweat suits and white socks, talking loudly as they "act out the intimacy of a mother-to-daughter relationship which they see as enviable.'' Even the most mundane activities are, for Ernaux, portents of a rapidly changing world increasingly removed from the one she knew as a child and young adult.
Our age's angsts distilled to a wrenching clarity by a writer who knows how to look—and what to look for.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1996
ISBN: 1-888363-31-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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