A rewarding study by a first-rate arts writer.
Erudite extended essay about C.S. Lewis’s classic fantasy series, the meaning of reading in childhood and the author’s internal landscape.
Salon.com co-founder and staff writer Miller first entered Narnia some 40 years ago, when a second-grade teacher handed her a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Raised in a large Catholic family in California, she found a new world inside that novel and its six companions; she imagined she must reach Narnia or die trying. Naturally, she outgrew that feeling, but could never erase the powerful impact that Lewis (1898–1963) had on her youthful imagination. Revisiting the books as an adult, she was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia contained Catholic doctrine disguised as storytelling. Still, she could not let go of her childhood favorite texts without at least trying to move beyond her skepticism about organized religion. Sorting through her conflicted reactions, Miller realized what she disliked about the Chronicles as an adult could not eclipse what she had loved and would always love about the stories. The author’s intellectual and emotional journeys come together nicely here. The chapters on Lewis’s texts will be rough going for those who haven’t read the Narnia books, but Miller’s vivid plot summaries, enhanced by her accomplished literary criticism, could possibly bring every member of her audience into the loop. Her intellectual biography of Lewis, doled out in fragments across the chapters, is less successful. Nonetheless, Miller’s insights about the Oxford don are sometimes stunning. She notes, for example, the temptation to call Lewis misanthropic, but adds, “he liked people well enough—as long as he believed they were a lot like him.” Other authors, Tolkien in particular, receive Miller’s scrutiny as well, but always in relation to Lewis and his imagined world.
A rewarding study by a first-rate arts writer.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-01763-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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