THE CORRESPONDENCE OF SHELBY FOOTE AND WALKER PERCY

Name: THE CORRESPONDENCE OF SHELBY FOOTE AND WALKER PERCY
Author: Jay Tolson
ISBN: 0-393-04031-3

edited by Jay Tolson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1996

Despite shortcomings in the editorial packaging, the letters provide a fascinating window into a lifelong friendship and the...

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Tolson marshals a more comprehensive selection of the 1948-90 correspondence excerpted in his Percy biography, Pilgrim in the Ruins (1992).

Percy's reputation rests on his novels, especially the National Book Award-winning The Moviegoer and Love in the Ruins, Foote's on his titanic nonfiction narrative The Civil War. Because literary orthodoxy beholds Percy as the brighter star, it's surprising how much more brilliantly Foote shines here. Though younger by six months, Foote, who published four novels by age 35, is initially a kind of artistic big brother to Percy, who in 1948 began the first of two unpublished novels that preceded The Moviegoer. Since Foote didn't save Percy's letters until 1970, the first 22 years are one-sided: Foote's expansive, 19th-century epistolary style (he recaps Percy's philosophical and artistic arguments as he refutes them) is nearly detailed enough to carry the monologue, and his passion—for writing, reading, music, food—is more than up to the task. However, better annotation from Tolson (as well as a fuller introduction that would put their works in a sequential context) would have shed some welcome light. Even as Percy's star rises, his letters—shorter, less composed, and less frequent—reveal a more tentative, self-doubting muse compared with the brimming confidence that propels Foote fearlessly into his 1.5-million-word magnum opus. Beneath the deeply abiding fraternal affection of boyhood friends (they met at 14 in Greenville, Miss.) lie diametrical approaches to art. Foote, driven to tell stories because "how a thing happens is more interesting than what happens'' or why, advises the "christian existentialist'' (as Percy ruefully considered himself pigeonholed) to "leave psychology to the psychologists, theology to the theologians.'' Percy saves his didacticism for fiction, while Foote continuously assails his friend with literary advice and books to read—most prominently Proust, whom Percy resists to the end.

Despite shortcomings in the editorial packaging, the letters provide a fascinating window into a lifelong friendship and the writing life.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-393-04031-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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I AM OZZY

by Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 25, 2010

An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

- IN THE NEWS
Ozzy Osbourne Dies at 76

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)