A terrific collection that maps one of the last century’s most fascinating minds. (8 b&w photos and 2 illustrations,...
Macdonald biographer Wreszin (A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 1994, not reviewed) presents riveting samples of the correspondence of the late critic, social commentator, and essayist.
Macdonald (1906–82) was the antithesis to the current barmy notion that people ought to be consistent. And there is no better evidence of his animated, inquiring, evolving intelligence than these letters that span 60 years. The young man who admired Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1926 (for the comeuppance it showed being delivered to the “cocky, insolent niggers”) was replaced by the crusty old liberal warhorse who, in 1967, wrote what was basically a fan letter to Martin Luther King. Macdonald worked for Henry Luce at Time, and at Luce’s new publication Fortune. After a stint at Partisan Review (and an extended affair with communism), he founded his own short-lived journal (Politics), and many of his most compelling (and outrageous) letters came from this period. “I can work up a moral indignation quicker than a fat tennis player can work up a sweat,” he wrote to a friend in 1929. Macdonald was a fierce critic (of books and films), and many of his letters smoke with acidic comments about books and writers. He told Mary McCarthy that he found Dos Passos “fattish and complacent” at a dinner in 1946 and called The Age of Innocence “a very good second-rate novel.” Macdonald’s professional ethics are everywhere on display (he refused, for example, to publish with Henry Regnery because of that publisher’s support for Joseph McCarthy), and his love letters are as touching as they are troubling (many are to lovers rather than his wife). Unfortunately, there is no statement of editorial principles (so we don’t know if ellipses, for example, are Macdonald’s or Wreszin’s), and for some reason Wreszin does not identify Macdonald’s place of writing, leaving us to infer it from context—often impossible to do.
A terrific collection that maps one of the last century’s most fascinating minds. (8 b&w photos and 2 illustrations, some not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2001
ISBN: 1-56663-393-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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