Attached to the notion that all places are stories and all stories places, Mason, at his best, draws an illuminating...
A combination of penetrating considerations of renowned and out-of-fashion poets and keen appreciations of the interplay of landscape and culture.
Poet and novelist Mason (English/Colorado Coll.; Sea Salt, 2014, etc.), who served as the poet laureate of Colorado from 2010 to 2014, avoids an excess of academic jargon in favor of a straightforward style, though occasionally his descriptions lean toward the overwrought and there is a tendency, largely understandable, to worship at the altar of poetry a little too devoutly. The strengths of this collection are the author’s closely reasoned essays and expansive book reviews. Apart from a reminiscence of his years in Greece, which generates thoughtful appreciations of the writers Patrick Leigh Fermor (“a life of inspired insouciance”) and Bruce Chatwin, Mason explores the work of a wide range of literary artists. The best of these approach such notables as W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, and Robinson Jeffers with fresh eyes and bracing prose. At times, Mason mounts a rigorous defense of the artist in question; at others, he offers cleareyed, warts-and-all analyses. Early on he also recalls the interesting story of how The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was rescued by a philologist in a remainder bin in 1861 and the process by which it was published and disseminated and became a sensation. Clearly, reading (and writing) is a form of travel and transcendence for the author, who conveys this feeling in erudite, often intoxicating language—though he does get rather inebriated himself from time to time. Mason wears his liberalism prominently, which is fine when not walking the precipice of preachiness, as he sometimes does, but it is hard to dispute his melancholy assessment that “history can seem a bombardment of human stupidities.”
Attached to the notion that all places are stories and all stories places, Mason, at his best, draws an illuminating literary cartography with many fascinating ports of call.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58988-123-5
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
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
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