Appreciative essays on Japanese aesthetics and mores, delivered with sumi-like grace and delicacy. Elder (English/Middlebury; co-ed., The Norton Book of Nature Writing—not reviewed) makes good use of his sabbatical in Japan: He and his family settle into a traditional Kyoto neighborhood; he takes shodo (calligraphy) and Go lessons; his children attend a Japanese elementary school and learn kendo (swordsmanship) and nanga (watercoloring) after-hours. This blanket immersion in the culture affords Elder a ``richly marginal year'' in which he tastes Japanese life in a way closed to most visitors. For him, traditional Japan is a set of practices ``centered on doing and looking'': His painting teacher proceeds by example, without explanations; education is an unusual brew of rote memory and freedom to experiment, with children breaking into small groups at will to try out ideas planted by the teacher. Go class and contacts with Noh theater reveal to the author Japan's highly articulated gender roles, in which men speak in gruff monosyllables and women chirp and smile. This extreme cultivation marks Japan's approach to nature (``enfolding nature within history and culture''), which Elder explores through discussions of the Japanese spring, wilderness, and whale-hunting. His attempts to analyze Japanese psychology seem right on target, as in his observation that ``eating whales may actually typify the pleasure of rendering the vast and fearsome small,'' or that the ugliness of modern Japanese architecture stems from the nation's emphasis on interiority. Comparisons to America come frequently, without the believe-it-or- not tone of Edwin Reingold's Chrysanthemums and Thorns (p. 1241); instead, Elder substitutes a quiet admiration, and a hope that the American ideal of untamed wilderness and the Japanese ideal of humanized nature may somehow merge to the benefit of both. Balanced, gentle, meditative: an unusual find in today's books on Japan.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-8070-5906-4
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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