Bold criticism from a knowledgeable, bright writer who would rather declare than question, speculate, or wonder.
A collection of previous published essays/reviews about writers ranging from Samuel Pepys to Sinclair Lewis and beyond.
Allen is not a timorous or uncertain critic. The author of a previous collection, Twentieth-Century Attitudes (not reviewed), does not herself lack attitude. For works she likes she employs superlatives: e.g., Boswell’s biography of Johnson is “the greatest biography in the English language.” (Has she read them all?) For works or writers she does not admire, “shit” is the Most Favored Noun. William Saroyan, she writes, was “a world-class, king-sized, copper-bottomed Shit, with a capital S.” Lord Byron, too, was “one of the great shits of history.” Most of these putative reviews (whose original dates of publication should have been noted) first appeared in The New Criterion, which permitted Allen much space to expatiate upon the book under consideration as well as its context. These pieces tend to have a similar organization. For example, in a review of D. J. Taylor’s Thackeray biography, Allen spends most of her 19 pages summarizing and analyzing Thackeray’s life, work, and reputation; she confines her comments about Taylor to a handful of sentences. Books about Laurence Sterne, Wilkie Collins, and others receive much the same treatment in much the same fashion. Her New York Times Book Review pieces are briefer but likewise focused on the content of the book rather than its author’s capabilities or achievements. These also feature Allen’s characteristic certainty. For instance, in an assessment (somewhat altered from its original Times appearance) of Brenda Wineapple’s biography of Hawthorne, Allen declares that high-school students should not read The Scarlet Letter—too difficult—but should instead read The Blithedale Romance, a dark, melancholic novel featuring suicide and disillusion that she bizarrely characterizes as “a delightful send-up of the [Brook Farm] commune and its pretensions.”
Bold criticism from a knowledgeable, bright writer who would rather declare than question, speculate, or wonder.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2004
ISBN: 1-56663-595-0
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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