Half of the writers here will cringe when they read their words in 20 years, but the rest provide some humdinging stuff, as...
A handful of young(ish) writers map their responses to J.D. Salinger’s work in essays that range from loose and funny to remarkably uptight, gathered by Poughkeepsie Review founding editor Kotzen and novelist Beller (The Sleep-Over Artist, 2000, etc.).
Slice him this way or that, Salinger has been an enormous influence on American literature. Kotzen and Beller asked 14 writers to consider their reactions to his writing, and the result is this jangle of pieces that knock about in Salingerland, for better or worse. Walter Kirn suggests that great books fade into the background while triggering self-centered memories, and if his writing-school essay is any measure of that indulgence, then The Catcher in the Rye is a very great book indeed. Emma Forrest administers Salinger the defibrillator—“Salinger is the literary equivalent of a pedophile: the child’s world equals good and all adults are fake and phoney. That’s how a pervert thinks”—and then turns it on herself: “I don't think that people who are phoney are necessarily a bad thing,” embarrassingly invoking Vonnegut to support her contention. Lucinda Rosenfeld is devilishly perceptive and fast to draw a sleeve across the windpipe, while noting that “brilliant writing tends to steam-roll everything in its path.” And Karen Bender is more specific in seeing “how characters disappeared into their gestures, dialogue, and how Salinger’s breath was transformed into perception, scene, craft.” Jane Mendelsohn shifts between some bedrock material, recognizing in Salinger kids’ first encounter with “two kinds of truth and that negotiating between them marks the beginning of the end of childhood,” and some really fruity stuff, like Catcher isn’t about understanding but rather “all about death.”
Half of the writers here will cringe when they read their words in 20 years, but the rest provide some humdinging stuff, as much tortured fun as their subject.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0799-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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