The Pushcart shows itself again a stream to pan for gold in.
The Pushcart, that great democratic literary experiment, continues, in its ample girth, to rumble forward filled with gems, blunders, bafflements, and gifts.
Sixty-six poems, essays, memoirs, fictions, and nonfictions make up this 27th collection of pieces from the thronging world of small presses, and there are plenty of new names to get acquainted with. One of these is Katherine Taylor, with her darkly comic memoir “Traveling with Mother”: “After the mutt dog died of cancer, I suggested we bury it in the pet cemetery outside. Daddy said, ‘What cemetery?’ I said, ‘Where you buried Buttons after you smashed her.’ He said, ‘Katherine, I scraped that dog off the driveway and threw it in the garbage.’ I said, ‘That’s against sanitation laws.’ ” There’s also Dan Chaon’s story of scorn and stupidity cunningly delivered (“I Demand to Know Where You’re Taking Me”), while the hot stiletto is poked into readers by Aimee Bender, in “Jinx.” Aleksandr Kushner provides a sidelong portrait of Vermeer (“This is what is called the absence of biography”) in “The Master of Delft,” and disquieted natural scientist Jeffrey A. Lockwood (“To Be Honest”) writes about how he “began to study grasshoppers in 1986, learning how they spent their days,” the better to kill them. If Louise Gluck’s poem “The Sensual World” cuts you down a peg, then Robert Pinsky’s “Book” will lift you with its offertory music. The shag and floss of D.A. Powell’s “[My Lot To Spin the Purple: That the Tabernacle Should Be Made]” invites rereading after rereading. One of the best selections is John Hales’s “Line,” a memoir of his summer working for the Cadastral Survey in laying down a line straight and true, an experience that leaves him with “chronic ideological confusion, occasional disorientation, and an unaccountable and unseemly pride.”
The Pushcart shows itself again a stream to pan for gold in.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-888889-33-0
Page Count: 602
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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