From familiar works to those not so well-known, Weinstein expertly extracts their timeless lessons.
Weinstein (Comparative Literature/Brown Univ.; Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to Bergman, 2008, etc.) eloquently mines the literary canon for rites-of-passage stories.
In this beautifully, tenderly conceived work, the author employs these seminal texts from Shakespeare to J.M. Coetzee to illuminate both the experience of his young students facing the beginning of their life’s journey and also his own, as a man well into his sunset years and looking back at the journey’s end. He uses as point of departure (and title) Oedipus’s answer to the Sphinx’s riddle—“What is the creature that is on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, three legs at night?”—to delve into these stories as excellent depictions of man at various stages of life. With marvelous clarity gained from three decades of teaching, Weinstein addresses the trajectory of growing up to growing old, moving from Oedipus’s own blindness and lack of agency in perpetrating his tragedy, to William Blake’s vision of a cruel collusion in acculturation gained in the breathtaking “Chimney Sweeper” poems, to the hard-knock lessons of the picaresque Lazarillo de Tormes and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The author also finds protagonists embittered by the illusory “final harvest,” forsaken and disempowered in their old age—from King Lear to Jean Racine’s Phèdre and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Throughout this astute, elegant text, Weinstein reminds us why we read (“Art makes life visible”) and why these stories are still especially relevant—“as that special mirror that shows up both how others have come through and how we might learn from them.” Chapters treating the theme of love as a “basic motor force” prove particularly incandescent, and with certain texts in particular—e.g., Tarjei Vesaas’s The Ice Palace, Faulkner novels, King Lear—the author attains a pitch of passionate rhapsody.
From familiar works to those not so well-known, Weinstein expertly extracts their timeless lessons.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6586-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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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