Shakespeare criticism that’s big, alive, towering, deep, passionate—in an age that so industriously miniaturizes and demeans...
Bloom says that in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), other matters kept him from saying “most of what [he] thought and felt” about Hamlet. A lucky thing, since now the great-hearted critic offers this little gem—deftly snatching Hamlet away from its legions of minor readers and reclaiming it for its major ones.
On the stateliest of notes, Bloom announces that Hamlet is so “unlimited” as to be “of no genre,” its greatness such that “it competes only with the world’s scriptures.” Such extraordinary significance can’t rise from a work that’s “about” the things that its commonly tendentious or politicized readers think—“mourning for the dead father,” say, or “outrage at [the] mother’s sexuality”—and Bloom discards the very notion that “the double shock of his father’s sudden death and his mother’s remarriage has brought about a radial change in” Hamlet. The infinitely greater and more interesting truth is that “Something in Hamlet dies before the play opens” and that the play’s real subject “is Hamlet’s consciousness of his own consciousness, unlimited yet at war with itself.” Only from so enormous a subject, the meaning of self-consciousness itself, and only through so prodigious a character as Hamlet (“he is cleverer than we are, and more dangerous”), does the play achieve its height, depth, and significance. Bloom asks questions that he may not, in so many words, answer—why does Hamlet come back to Elsinore after England? why does Shakespeare “so cheerfully” risk the very “dramatic continuity” of the play? why does he provide for the towering Hamlet so meager, paltry, and “mere” an opponent as Claudius? In every case: because the play, “a cosmological drama,” is so big that it’s bursting its own seams; because it serves simply as an excuse for the demonstration of its own enormity; because Hamlet is a character wrestling with “his desire to come to an end of playacting.”
Shakespeare criticism that’s big, alive, towering, deep, passionate—in an age that so industriously miniaturizes and demeans its literature.Pub Date: March 10, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-233-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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