An eloquently thought-provoking memoir.
Bookslut founder and editor Crispin’s account of how she set off in search of meaning by following in the footsteps of dead writers, artists, and composers.
After confiding suicidal impulses to a friend and then being confronted with a possible trip to a psychiatric hospital, the author knew she had to act. So she packed her suitcases and left for Europe to be among the “wandering souls who were willing to scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere.” With mordant wit and a dash of bravado, Crispin interweaves the story of her journey to commune with the spirits of men and women who shared her existential crises with autobiographical details and astute critical insights. In Berlin, she meditated on the despair that sent William James fleeing from the United States while contemplating her own sense of personal failure. In Trieste, she reflected on the life of James Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, a woman who loved a man she could not count on. In the south of France, Crispin mused on the life and work of another kindred spirit, Margaret Anderson, a fellow Midwesterner who founded and co-edited the Little Review, one of the most influential avant-garde literary magazines of the early 20th century. After years of struggle, her work would all be destroyed in a court battle over her serialization of Ulysses, a book deemed too obscene for American readers. Constantly questioning the choices of her “guides” and finding no easy answers to her own concerns about life and love, Crispin continued to travel and “chase discomfort.” Yet by the time she reached the last destination in the book, the Greek island of Zakynthos, she could embrace the randomness of a life journey that was now literally lived at the flip of a coin. Through moments of ennui, drunkenness, and intense joy, Crispin had unexpectedly discovered meaning in the ever renewing possibilities of a life lived in fluidity.
An eloquently thought-provoking memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-226-27845-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
PROFILES
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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