Like sampler chocolates: it’s possible to consume in one sitting, which says much about its quality, considering its length....
A jackpot of Thurber correspondence—from light entertainments to pure vitriol, with the fascination of an evolutionary timeline.
Thurber “never allowed language to stand still,” writes the tireless Thurber-phile Kinney (James Thurber, 1995), and readers of these letters, written in language that jumps, are invited into Thurber’s head to witness the changes in the man that came with the years—from fusspot to peeve to curmudgeon—and the steadiness of his convictions to romanticism (“the blow that cools James is the Hope that Spouts eternal about the One Girl”), brevity (“getting the atmosphere of the style to fit . . . takes . . . longer than to make a Manhattan, about as long as to make a Martini”), and his writing, which he defended. As he wrote to an editor at the New York Times Book Review: “I rarely use the ugly word ‘grew’ and I have changed it back to ‘was’. This is not only good English, it is the way I write, and this is my piece.” Thurber’s words frequently snap like dangerous teeth: “Why shouldn’t I be sarcastic if I wish? Do you think it is a simple matter to give one’s whole heart away,” he writes to an unrequited love. And editors at the New Yorker got bitten time and again: “I must object to a recent manifestation of the hyper-precisionists on your magazine.” Then there are the many letters that serve to lift the spirits in their cheer and humor—to his daughter, fellow writers, friends, family—and those that chart his health or the life of a relationship, particularly that with the E.B. Whites or, more particular still, with Katherine White, to whom he goes from writing, “don’t worry about having to edit my stuff. . . . I’m not worrying” to “the results . . . were little short of complete disaster.”
Like sampler chocolates: it’s possible to consume in one sitting, which says much about its quality, considering its length. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2343-8
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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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