Another work of uncompromised literary analysis, thought, and feeling, from the mind of Bloom: towering, real, invaluable.
The latest from the venerable Bloom (Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, 2003, etc.) may not always be easy going, but it’s invariably rewarding and rich.
There are “only three criteria,” says Bloom, that determine the books he’ll continue “reading and teaching”: “aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, wisdom.” But this isn’t wisdom you can put in your pocket and take home. Not only will this kind not make you feel better—“I have not found that wisdom literature is a comfort”—but you may not even be able to figure out what it is: “The Book of Job offers wisdom, but it is not anything we can comprehend.” Still, it’s there, in its own power, significance, and insistence (wisdom writing “must be rich”). This literature “teaches us to accept natural limits,” Bloom says at one moment, then reverses, saying that “Job could not console Herman Melville and his Captain Ahab, but provoked them to furious response.” Perfect consistency is too small a concept for this kind of wisdom, as Bloom argues that the drama form was too small for Hamlet. In any case, with the unflagging curiosity and the associative powers of one who seems to have read all books written, Bloom takes us through studies in pairings, of Job paired with Ecclesiastes, Plato with Homer (the battle between philosophy and poetry), Cervantes, and Shakespeare. Declaring that “Thoughts are events,” he gives us Montaigne and Bacon, Johnson and Goethe, Emerson and Nietzsche, and at last Freud and Proust, in a pairing as fascinating as any here. In closing, he touches on the Gospel of Thomas and on Augustine’s “invention” of reading, adding that “Reading alone will not save us or make us wise, but without it we will lapse into the death-in-life of the dumbing-down in which America now leads the world, as in all other matters.”
Another work of uncompromised literary analysis, thought, and feeling, from the mind of Bloom: towering, real, invaluable.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-57322-284-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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
© 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.
