A life of the eminent critic, a controversial figure whose ideas were influential wherever English was taught—except at Cambridge University, the institution that grudgingly employed him. Indeed, F.R. Leavis (18951978) seemed to make a career of being snubbed by the university's English department. Of the Cambridge Critics, including rivals I.A. Richards and William Empson, Leavis had the longest exile, despite (or because of) such notable works of criticism as The Great Tradition and New Bearings in English Poetry. He was also for two decades the editor of Scrutiny, an influential journal. As former pupil MacKillop (English/Sheffield Univ., England) shows in this approving but not official biography, Leavis worked passionately to establish serious standards for the study of English literature, to counter both suffocating Oxbridge classicism and Bloomsbury dillettantism. With an unreliable part-time lectureship, and the help of his unofficial study group, the ``Research Society,'' and of his equally erudite wife, Queenie (author of Fiction and the Reading Public), Leavis built his own intellectual elite within the university. Only very late in his career did he receive a stable position at Downing College. It did not lessen his combative spirit. Leavis's famous attack on C.P. Snow, whom he called ``portentously ignorant,'' was part of a broader effort to keep education in the humanities from becoming a backwater in modern Britain. Yet, citing aesthetic principles, the complex Leavis, the preeminent Lawrence scholar, refused to join the fight to get the ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover lifted. Of the rebarbative Leavis's many sides explored here, the one most likely to stir immediate sympathy is his experiences on an ambulance train during WW I. MacKillop, as objective as a Leavisian can be, does not ignore his mentor's more embarrassing fallings-out with his college and with some of his protÇgÇs. A thorough and candid examination from the academic trenches of the most combative of the Cambridge Critics. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16357-6
Page Count: 493
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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