An intriguing look into the male psyche.
A collection of interviews of men, conducted by a woman, about what it means to be male in today’s world.
Poet Barry (Home, 2007) writes that she’s always been “mystified by much of [men’s] behavior.” She says that she fell deeply in love with a man when she was in her 50s, but she often found him emotionally inscrutable—an exasperating experience that inspired her to further interrogate the nature of masculinity and its demands. She started by interviewing men in midlife, then interviewed boys and male subjects in their twilight years. All in all, she talked with more than 80 people, ranging in age from 9 to 94. Her sample is remarkably diverse—straight, gay, transgendered; white, African-American, Latino, Asian-American—with people from a variety of different religions, educational backgrounds, and careers. Barry says that she selected responses that displayed the most vulnerability, which is an abiding theme of the book; sometimes she presents the responses as easily digestible sound bites and other times, as longer essays. Along the way, she addresses boyhood, violence, sex, suicide, fatherhood, and fidelity, just to name a few major concepts. Barry comes to appreciate the extent to which cultural expectations shape and limit a man’s search for identity— including some that she says are set by women. The author seems to have a special talent for extracting candor from her subjects—the confessional transparency of her results is as astonishing as it is moving. The breadth of the interviews is also remarkable; one gets the feeling that the book not only covers the male perspective, but much of the full spectrum of the human experience. The author’s own contributions are thoughtful and elegantly expressed, evincing a motivation that goes beyond simple curiosity: “This inquiry was born of heartache. The sorrow of not knowing how to reach another when this is so much our common human longing. I wanted to keep my heart and mind open.”
An intriguing look into the male psyche.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-692-59254-0
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Phoenix Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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