A florid history of the 1960s' best-known radical theater. Tytell ((English/Queens College; Ezra Pound, 1987, etc.) knows his subject matter well, although he often lacks the perspective to give a balanced picture of this innovative theatrical troupe and its quirky founders, painter-turned-actor/director Julian Beck and his wife, actress/director Judith Malina. The couple met in the late 1940s (a meeting Tytell calls ``cataclysmic'' for the thunderstruck 17-year-old Malina) and discovered that they shared a dream of establishing a ``poet's theatre.'' Existing on the peripheries of the avant-garde movement, the duo crossed paths with many seminal figures, from painters Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock to composers John Cage and Alan Hovhaness, and writers Allen Ginsberg, James Agee (who was briefly involved with Malina), and Tennessee Williams. The cast of characters played a seemingly endless game of musical beds, and the head spins in reading Tytell's lengthy descriptions of everyone sleeping in various combinations with everyone else. The company's first success came in the late '50s with a realistic depiction of heroin addicts waiting for their supplier (The Connection), followed by a portrait of the regimented life of a Marine (The Brig). Beck, Malina, and their followers spent the mid-'60s as tax exiles in Europe, returning to the US in 1968 with their semi-improvised play, Paradise Now, featuring a famous ``group grope'' scene enacting sexual freedom in all its variety. The Living Theatre continued its peripatetic existence through the '70s and '80s, performing on the streets and in theaters from American college campuses to the slums of Brazil. Beck died of colon cancer in 1985, but the company continued to perform on New York's Lower East Side, although by then they were marginal to the life of the theater. Throughout, Tytell uses an acolyte's overheated language to uncritically celebrate a long-gone era in the arts. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8021-1558-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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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