Although Edmund Wilson himself prepared much of his prodigious critical output for posterity, including three volumes of selected short essays, there is enough left over to make up a serviceable, if slightly reduced, overview. With Wilson's achievement (and reputation) in partial eclipse for his centenary, Groth (English/SUNY, Plattsburgh) and Castronovo (English/Pace Univ.), both of whom have written previously on Wilson, undertake a reconstruction of the development of his eclectic pursuits in one volume. They have picked mainly serious, slightly stodgy pieces, usually on Modernists, Marxists, or canonical figures like T.S. Eliot and Henry James; these add up to an essentially representative selection that begins with his earliest writings. Unlike the editors, though, Wilson wisely never collected his prep school and Nassau Literary Magazine juvenilia, which display his bad habits of pomposity and overemphatic pronouncement, such as a self-important survey of prep school literary magazines or tagging Chesterton "a genius, if you will." He curbed but never purged these tendencies from the lucid style he polished in the 1920s, though again his weighty attempts are over-represented in this section. More interesting are his fellow-traveler writings from the 1930s, which show aspects of his left-wing fervor that Wilson later smoothed over. But the neglect here of formative experiences in WW I fumbles a key to much of Wilson's cultural and political convictions. After WW II he reviewed regularly for the New Yorker, where he returned frequently to old favorites such as Stein, Faulkner, and Joyce, confident in his style of polished asperity. Groth and Castronovo have found both useful undertakings and curiosa from Wilson's career, but as a companion volume, this cannot quite keep up with the rest of his corpus.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8214-1127-6
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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