A well-focused snapshot of the current state of the art for art’s sake. As always, though, the collection is...
The venerable Pushcart Prize turns 30. It’s looking pretty good, though it could probably stand to lose a little weight and get some more fresh air.
It’s a year of anniversaries: Threepenny Review, one of the usual suspects in the anthology’s pages, is 25, as is the Sonora Review, a student-run contender; Ontario Review is 30; City Lights Books is 50; and so on. As always, Henderson and a small army of volunteer editors scour the literary journals and other outlets to turn up a fine assortment of poems, short stories and essays. Some have the factory sameness of MFA-program-generated work, to be sure, with a self-regarding, anxious feel (“Manhattan, Joy thought, was just a moment’s cinder in the eye of eternity.” “Am I making sense? Or am I the family disgrace my father says I am?”). Most of the pieces are satisfyingly strong, though, with something to say and some memorable way to say it. Brian Doyle’s meditation on the heart, and love, is a standout: “You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you . . .” Tess Gallagher, E.L. Doctorow, Ted Kooser and other mainstays turn in fresh-sounding pieces, while there are delights from comparative newcomers such as Cynthia Shearer, whose Faulknerian novels seem to draw on her service as a guide at William Faulkner’s house-turned-museum (“ ‘Show me where he drowned his wife in the pool,’ said an elderly lady one time. ‘You’re perhaps thinking of William Shatner,’ said the grad student on duty that day’).
A well-focused snapshot of the current state of the art for art’s sake. As always, though, the collection is hernia-inducing; smaller would indeed be beautiful.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-888889-42-X
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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