Philosophical, sophisticated literary forays that are a pleasure to dwell in.
A gathering of honest, luminous essays on home and travel.
“Place is identity, style, faith, cosmology,” writes Frank (All the News I Need, 2017, etc.) in her latest book, the winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. From this assured, thoughtful view, the author reveals how traveling as an older adult has brought shifting perspectives. In a piquant opening essay, Frank considers First-World complaints on the inconvenience of going anywhere paired with the still-held romantic belief in travel's worth. A humorous piece on shopping for the right bag morphs into memories of childhood, linking present and past through ideas of containment, organization, and portability. The sights of Firenze, Italy, inspire separate impressions that show the city as a place both marred and upheld by tourism. Frank skillfully uses the ordinary aspects of traveling to segue into wide-ranging insights on belonging, longing, and home, with occasional familiar laments. These include the embarrassing behavior of Americans and timely comments on the current Trumpian moment (“when surroundings dazzle, Blue-leaning humans romanticize. We assume that a landscape’s loveliness seeps into its inhabitants”). It's the autobiographical essays, though, that linger the most. The aching standout, “Cave of the Iron Door,” features a return to the author’s hometown, Phoenix. Frank overlays a familiar yet alien, desert landscape with memories of her parents' strained marriage. The nostalgic, elegiac movement from childhood magic to hindsight about her mother's isolation in the 1950s is heartbreaking, and the essay culminates in her mother's death from a barbiturate overdose. For all its attentiveness to beauty and loss, this wise and humorous collection is also a moving record of anticipation and expectation. Each place, taken on its own terms, yields up its own flavors and character, but everyone is bound by one eloquent fact: "time is the vastest real estate we know."
Philosophical, sophisticated literary forays that are a pleasure to dwell in.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8263-6137-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of New Mexico
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
