In the second volume of an intended trilogy about writing, novelist/memoirist (and longtime Kirkus reviewer) Newlove (Curranne Trueheart, 1986, etc.) infuses readers with a sense of the power that real feeling, honestly observed, brings to great writing. Newlove sings and celebrates, and sometimes playfully deflates, gorgeous passages of description from Hemingway, Bunyan, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Chandler, Mailer, Whitman, and many others. By describing how a particular passage strikes him—sometimes in the back muscles, sometimes straight through the heart—Newlove shows that it's earthy feeling rather than any superhuman feat of intellect or froth of words that carves out the indelible ``spiritual landscape'' of a Tolstoy or Shakespeare. Riffing on one classic passage after another, bubbling over with an infectious love of language, Newlove demonstrates how vision and moral force in literature flow always from some true perception of the value of life: Truth must come from ``a man's grip on life.'' Hence we taste the brine that Hemingway tastes in the oysters he gobbles in Paris; we share a luscious, greedy snack of ham with Thomas Wolfe; we embrace the world of the body with Whitman; we drink in horror at the hands of Conrad. We even sample the fall and rise of Newlove himself as ``Drunkspeare,'' an alcoholic writer step-by-step restored to his exuberant senses. In some of his most useful passages, Newlove jokes about greats like ``Wild Bill'' Shakespeare so that we may see ``the simplicity, almost raggedness of his lines.'' Newlove freely abridges Hemingway, and prunes Conrad's jungle, but, strangely, he touches not a word in Mailer's Ancient Evenings—seeing ``brilliancies everywhere—and not a stuffed bird among them.'' Here, as in First Paragraphs (1992), the self-styled ``Dr. Don'' gives transfusions of the living spirit ``that breathes out of the writer's breast.''
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1993
ISBN: 0-8050-2978-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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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