Myriad allusions swarm like bees in this busy but ultimately ordinary hive. (b&w illustrations throughout)
Weinstein waxes rhapsodic about Literature and Life—and Death and Depression, too.
Perhaps it’s the author’s other career, as a flashy Brown University lecturer on world literature for The Teaching Company’s audio and video recordings, that creates an identity crisis for his sometimes brilliant, sometimes bloated text. Am I a motivational speech? it asks. A pyrotechnic lecture to animate stupefied sophomores? An esoteric article for my academic peers? A vocabulary lesson for those no longer challenged by the Reader’s Digest quiz? A florid paean to art and literature? An aw-shucks populist bath for the great unwashed in a bottomless pool of allusions? To all of the above: “yes.” Weinstein’s thesis, stated early and often, is that literature deals with the most fundamental issues of humanity. There are no relevant distinctions among heart and mind and muscle. Illness and pain are not metaphors. They are life. His title alludes to the scream of humanity that pervades our “house,” connecting us all. That scream, he argues, is the subject of great art and literature. An unapologetic Freudian, Weinstein alludes to just about every name in Western literature and art, with a special fondness for Proust, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Dickinson, Blake, Sophocles, Burroughs, Hawthorne, and on and on. He writes most eloquently about Edvard Munch, whose paintings prove nearly every argument the author advances. Although Weinstein says he’s aiming at just plain folk (“I have tried to write this book in the language of everyday speaking”), his diction often betrays him, and Mr. and Mrs. America will no doubt have to click on dictionary.com for somatic usurpation, alterity, hermeneutic, entropic, oneiric, and other polysyllabic peanuts in what is frequently not basic Cracker Jack prose. Every now and then, though, he reminds us that he’s just an ordinary guy, writing about Oedipus and Tiresias and Creon as “male honchos” who are “duking it out.”
Myriad allusions swarm like bees in this busy but ultimately ordinary hive. (b&w illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50624-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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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