By the end of this refreshingly modern take on literature, Batuman feels like a friend, and her essays like the remarkably...
In her debut, New Yorker contributor and n+1 fan favorite Batuman turns lit-crit on its head with a cheeky, guided tour through her own literary scholarship.
The academy wasn’t always the author’s life calling; rather, the “six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman” dreamed of writing her novels. But fate—and her mother’s copy of Anna Karenina—intervened, leading to a series of adventures delving deep into Babel, Tolstoy, Chekhov and other such notables. Part travelogue, part anthropological study and part meditation on literature, her essays take readers into the strange corners of her academic journey, including the ice palaces of St. Petersburg, the streets of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where bakeries are signified by a flat loaf of bread literally nailed to the doors, and a literary convention in suburban California. Fans of popular Russian writers will delight in the Tolstoy chapter, in which Batuman finds herself at a convention of scholars, investigating a possible murder on the grounds of Tolstoy’s ancestral home. The chapter evolves like a real-life, esoteric version of the board game Clue. The author’s dissection of a Stanford Babel convention—her first essay ever published—is biting and thoroughly entertaining. The longest and most engrossing chapters focus on her bizarre foray into Central Asia, where she seeks a link between her Turkish heritage and the Russian literature she has come to adore, deeply testing the bonds of a romantic relationship along the way. The essays are arranged almost haphazardly, with the Samarkand summer broken into three parts interspersed with other essays, but that only adds to the book’s quirky charm.
By the end of this refreshingly modern take on literature, Batuman feels like a friend, and her essays like the remarkably well-constructed, analytical, eye-opening e-mails you always wanted that friend to send.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-53218-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
