An unguarded, somewhat informal study of poetic struggle and human faith, by the unsinkably prolific Harvard dynast of modern literary criticism. Bloom (Poetry and Repression, Shelley's Mythmaking, etc.) has never been so critically intimate as in this pseudotestimonial on belief and poetry. Personal affinity rather than academic intrigue seems to have determined the literary pantheon surveyed here—beginning with the Hebrew Bible (which he admits to reading in old age as consolation for solitude), ranging through Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. Bloom's elusive subject is the "sublime," defined as the realm of spiritual struggle "between truth and meaning" that provides literature its transcendent moments. For Bloom, Shakespearean sublimity lies in the playwright's "cognitive power"—which, as in the figure of Hamlet, "contains cultural history." For Milton, it is supernal ambition—the faith that his own life "incarnated truth." Freud and the Bible share for Bloom an awesome reverence for authority and memory—an obsession he also finds central to sublimity in Kafka and Beckett. Bloom constructs this majestic rubric with his usual erudition and grace, leavened with in-jokes, witticisms, and surprising jests. French theory is one floating target; his own academic importance is another. Finally, there is deadpan: what does one make of Bloom's claim that Milton's Satan is more like Reagan than Freud? Perhaps Bloom's most accessible book, and probably his most endearing: a bounty of coy surprises and typical leaps of brilliance.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1988
ISBN: 0674780280
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988
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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