A tasteless, tell-all bio of the outrageous, screaming stand- up comic Kinison, by his manager/brother. But how else to write the life story of a comedian whose tag line was ``Oh! Oh! Aaaaaaugh!'' and whose on-stage rantings included riffs on serial killers, sissy POWs, Satan, crucifixion, Charles Manson, world hunger, cunnilingus, and homosexual necrophilia? The son of a blackballed Pentecostal minister, Kinison was a ``traveling evangelist'' until 1978 when he decided to try stand-up comedy. Starting out in Houston, he felt by 1980 that his loud, vulgar, abrasive routine was ready for the famed Comedy Store in Los Angeles. It took a few years, but by 1983 Kinison had become a ``paid regular.'' He parlayed his growing local notoriety into spots on an HBO special and in Rodney Dangerfield's film Back to School. By 1985, he was nationally known, his screaming diatribes against women and marriage earning him close to $1 million annually. But his drinking, excessive drug use, and abuse of his wives and numerous lovers (who included director Penny Marshall, actress Beverly D'Angelo, and porn star Seka) would take their toll. Despite such powerful admirers as Robin Williams, Howard Stern, and David Letterman, Kinison would alienate the power brokers who might have solidified his career. The ``rock and roll'' comic, Kinison will perhaps best be remembered for his video rendition of ``Wild Thing,'' in which he spits and screams abuse at a writhing, delirious Jessica Hahn (yet another former lover) while snarling Billy Idol and a motley crew of heavy-metal heroes join the fun. Kinison died at the age of 38 in a car accident. At least, writes his brother, ``he did not die of excess'' like John Belushi. Unrestrained, ugly, and grotesquely, perversely captivating. Like the man himself.
Pub Date: May 20, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-12634-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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