Weird Trieste! Triste Trieste! Cary (English/University of Connecticut) recalls his brief stay in Trieste—a city he visited in search of its literary glory. What a surprise when Cary finds that Trieste—literary Trieste—doesn't exist; nor, really, does cultural Trieste. Its writers, in fact, bemoan the city's utter lack of cultural flowering, knocking it for blocking ``any initiative designed to give it a cultural character of physiognomy, not only in its disintegrative atmosphere but in its individuals, who willingly isolate themselves or go elsewhere. It has a bitter air....'' So said Trieste's storyteller Giani Stuparich in 1948, who added that his life there ``is a torment and continuous vigil.'' Cary finds himself alone as a ghost in Trieste as he spends three weeks searching for the shades of Italo Svevo, Umberto Saba, and James Joyce (who, during his ten years in the city, wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Giacomo Joyce, some of Pomes Penyeach, and began Ulysses). Cary—finding almost nothing but a spot or two where these famed folk sat and gazed at the Adriatic—supplies instead an amused (but less than amusing) history of the seaport, which has existed for over two millennia. The historical passages serve as factual steppingstones during the author's more baffled wanderings about the city and its hills, and during his lying awake at night listening to American sailors on shore leave laughing below his window louvers. To be sure, Cary does find a literary Trieste, but it's all in books about Trieste, whose authors he catalogues while detailing their ecstasies and laments. He also includes a sheaf of his translations of several poems written in or about the city. Delectations for the ghostly only. (Eight halftones, 17 line drawings, four maps)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-226-09528-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
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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