Filtering out the mythic anecdotes that have built up around Steinbeck, Parini (The Last Station, 1990, etc.) presents a straightforwardly readable portrait and assessment of one of the last practitioners of the Great American Novel. For one of the most popular American authors worldwide, Steinbeck seemed happier as an aimless young man, surviving off odd jobs, intermittently attending Stanford University, and harboring an intense conviction of his talent, than as a bestselling author, Broadway and Hollywood success, and Pulitzer and Nobel prize winner. Steinbeck's personal life was complicated by his intense need for reassurance and stimulation, at odds with a sometimes withdrawn, rigidly principled nature—a product, Parini suggests, of his loving but forceful mother and distant father. But his friendships with the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the eccentric marine biologist Ed Ricketts, actor Burgess Meredith (who starred in the film Of Mice and Men), and the editor Pascal Corvini were long and deep. Campbell and Ricketts had considerable influence on Steinbeck's larger vision: the latter, in his ``organismal'' approach to man's place in society and on earth, and the former, in his mythic sensibility (though their friendship was cut short by Campbell's affair with Steinbeck's first wife, Carol). Parini also gives Carol Steinbeck due credit for her editorial assistance to her difficult husband and her social activism. Parini underscores Steinbeck's passion for writing, whether journalism during WW II, travelogues of scientific expeditions and journeys across the US and USSR, or a translation of Malory. Rounding out this perceptive biography, Parini judiciously charts the paradoxes of Steinbeck's later years: his happier third marriage complicated by his uneasy relationship with his sons from his second; his progressive disillussionment with postwar America and his equivocal support of the Vietnam war; and the hostile critical reception of his Nobel Prize. Parini's persuasive and lucid biography creates a vivid diptych of a turbulent individual and a neglected paragon of American letters. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-1673-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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
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
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