There’s lots of good writing here, as always. A stalwart, and a staple, of American letters.
Pushcart pushes on, entering its fourth decade of anthologizing the year’s crop of small- and literary- press stories, poems and essays.
As usual, these overstuffed pages, always with a surprise or two, contain a mix of the well known and not—though, this year, the number of workshop celebrities seems lower than normal. There is the familiar blend of the exalted with the humdrum, for even after all these years the ghost of Ray Carver looms over the land, chronicling how tedious we have all become. (“Wait, Sheryl. I call the police and there’s no stopping it, like a roller coaster it’ll just go down, down into tragedy.” “The nice thing about a digital camera was it allowed him to see the results immediately.” “Thank God I’m only as fucked up as I am and not as fucked up as those other people.”) One neorealist development of note is the emergence of Iraq as setting and backdrop, notably in Benjamin Percy’s volume-opening “Refresh, Refresh,” with its Deer Hunter vision of how war affects small towns that will always supply fresh troops, no matter how its people have suffered. But then there are the evocations of shooting dogs, of accordions in malls, of neuralgia galore; and contemporary writers, it would seem, give pizza an altogether too-central place in the great chain of being, perhaps because they are all former grad students. A mixed bag, then, though editor Bill Henderson and his able assistants have turned up some gems, with some transcendental moments: Brian Doyle cataloguing the things in life worth living for (“You either take a flying leap at nonsensical illogical unreasonable ideas like marriage and marathons and democracy and divinity, or you huddle behind the wall”), Wendell Berry gentling chiding the blockhead culture and Maureen Stanton pondering the meaning of laundry and life.
There’s lots of good writing here, as always. A stalwart, and a staple, of American letters.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2006
ISBN: 1-888889-43-8
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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