The prolific and controversial Highwater (Dark Legend, 1994) leaves behind his interest in American Indians and turns to his other obsession, aesthetics, in this ethereal and silly collection of essays. Examining the complex relationship among art, myth, and metaphor, the author contends that much of what we term ``reality'' is nothing more than our dreams turned into banalities. Real truth and meaning are to be found in the dreams themselves, but we lack the language to do them justice. Art, therefore, becomes the means by which we touch this ultimate reality. The job of the artist is thus to lead others to the realm of dreams and back again in such a way as to show that dreams are possible. The present volume explores the ways various artists seek to accomplish this task. Each of the essays takes its title from one of the 22 cards in the Tarot's Major Arcana. For instance, Highwater uses the Falling Tower, which symbolizes disorder and loss of old beliefs, as a springboard to discuss the modern period's divorce of art from the sacred. The Magician, who represents free will, creativity, and guile, serves as a metaphor for the modern artist who struggles against convention to speak in new forms. With the Empress, who stands for feminine power and terrestrial creation, Highwater returns to one of his familiar themes: ritual and our relation to the earth itself. In his final chapter he turns to the World, a nude figure of a woman symbolizing completion. By his own admission, he ends the volume as he began: Much of the final essay is a virtual verbatim repeat of the first. Filled with Jungian psychology, this unoriginal book relies heavily on the words and work of others, especially the late Joseph Campbell—who's a lot more fun to read.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8021-1518-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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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