Essential for students of the Church, and a vigorous and readable version of one of Western literature’s canonical works.
The second installment in prolific classicist and political theorist Wills’s ongoing, thoroughly brilliant translation of St. Augustine’s Confessions (St. Augustine’s Childhood: Confessiones, 2001).
“The scope of memory is vast, my God, in some way scary, with its depths, its endless adaptabilities—yet what are they but my own mind, my self?” Thus Augustine of Hippo, on the road to sainthood, contemplating himself contemplating the divine. Two-thirds of Augustine’s 13-volume Confessions (which Wills also renders as Testimony), written in the fourth century, concerns his life before his conversion to Christianity. Book Ten, which takes up most of the present volume, is, as Wills (Why I Am a Catholic, p. 870, etc.) notes, a hinge, “making the turn between an account of God’s graces shown to Augustine before his baptism . . . and a meditation on his life as baptized into the Trinity.” Concerning memory and the innermost workings of the human mind, Book Ten is notoriously difficult: it seeks to establish the memory not just as a vast warehouse wherein unordered experiences are stored and retrieved, but as one of the many dwellings of God. Augustine writes with crystalline clarity of the contents of his own memory: “I can, while smelling nothing, identify the wafture from a lily, contrast it with that of a violet.” But, turning from his own experience to the universal, he sometimes wanders into snarls of prose: “So if I remember not forgetting itself, but forgetting’s representation, then forgetting must have been present when the representation was formed from it.” Wills helpfully guides his readers through such knots in his endnotes, remarking, “Chesterton said that we tend to call this an odd world, though it is the only one we know. This is akin to Augustine’s discussion of the experience of remembering that we forgot, which is almost like sensation in a lost limb.”
Essential for students of the Church, and a vigorous and readable version of one of Western literature’s canonical works.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03127-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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