Narrow and uneven, but soaring in spurts.
Sixteen essays on the place of poetry in the cultural and physical landscape of Southern California.
Despite the title, being married to “the icepick killer” (actor David Dukes, who died in 2000) is not actually the focus of these musings by poet Muske-Dukes (Literature and Creative Writing/Univ. of Southern California). Rather, she is bent on “considering the influence of the manufacture of powerful images on the idea of the subversive,” with the subversive here being poetry. The city of Los Angeles, specifically its isolation, works well for Muske-Dukes, since “alienation is the real home of poets.” Yet the scattered, media-obsessed population of this sprawling burg embraces poetry—and creative writing in general—to the extent that billboards plastered with quotations from Dickinson, Eliot, and Bukowski appear along the freeway. The author presents the literary history of Southern California as evidence that this love hasn't occurred in a vacuum, but quickly moves on to offer recent specifics about some piquant situations created by the collision of poetry and film. Hired as a consultant on the WWII film U-571 starring Matthew McConaughey, she and fellow poet Stephen Yenser are asked to provide “poetic” words to be uttered over the final scene of the shipwrecked crew. (What a surprise: it didn’t work out.) Poetry and politics also make a curious mix: the author reports on a 1998 gathering of 50 poets at Clinton's White House, where the president's face lit up at the mention of Seamus Heaney. Interspersed are a graceful brace of essays about how Muske-Dukes met her husband, how their careers resonated, his thoughts about acting, and the epitaph from Shakespeare (“Let me play the lion too”) she and their daughter chose for his gravestone.
Narrow and uneven, but soaring in spurts.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50711-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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