Earnest ideas that lack the literary music to make them memorable.
A celebrated conductor argues that music is the essence of life and foundation of the universe, the close kin (if not the twin) of science, and a metaphor for the human community.
If his book were a musical score, Eger would probably splinter his baton in frustration: so much is going on simultaneously that cacophony and chaos threaten to overwhelm the themes. In a text that reads much like a series of ad hoc rants, paeans, broadsides, explications, and excoriations (not to mention a bit of self-promotion), the author shares his passion for music, his love of the “new” physics (how can a musician resist the symbolism of string theory?), and his deep worry about the disharmony and danger in today’s world. Unsurprisingly, Eger’s writing on music is the volume’s most revealing and most engaging. His admiration of Beethoven is patent, and his discussions (particularly of the Ninth Symphony) are illuminating, as are his comments about “perfect pitch.” Another hero is Einstein (who carried his violin everywhere), and Eger does a creditable job of explaining the general and special theories of relativity. He is greatly excited by quantum mechanics, wormholes, etc., and declares that he reads widely in the works of physicists, like George Smoot and Brian Greene, who write for popular audiences. (Eger is so animated, in fact, that he employs the exclamation point with a frequency unseen this side of middle-school essay contests!) He expends many pages summarizing what such scientists have said—and castigating both philistines who disdain the arts and religious fundamentalists who ignore or distort the discoveries of science. Eger sees both music and science as moving in directions that suggest, to him, an upheaval in world economic, political, and social conditions. Nation-states are obsolete, capitalism is destructive, waging war to establish peace is absurd. Can’t we all just get along?
Earnest ideas that lack the literary music to make them memorable.Pub Date: March 17, 2005
ISBN: 1-58542-388-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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