A charming, thoughtful book for lovers of Paris, the French language or good writing.
A collection of personal essays on the author’s (Singing the City: The Bonds of Home in an Industrial Landscape, 1998, etc.) love affair with the French language.
Graham’s lifelong affection for the French language led to her owning an apartment in Paris. While the French language transported her to the city, Paris transports her into the language. Being in a French city is for Graham simply a way to fulfill her dream of speaking the language around the clock. In these essays, the details of her life as a part-time Parisian lend immediacy to her descriptions, as readers follow her through the apartment-purchase process, adventures with the local utilities, explorations into her neighborhood and her gradual acclimatization to the routines of French life. Simple, direct language and charming illustrations draw readers in. The author’s experiences in the city–whether as a property owner, shopper or wife of a patient in a foreign hospital–are all fertile ground for further fluency. She observes and absorbs the words that surround her and each essay reveals a different perspective on her life within the language. Graham savors new expressions, learns to change the shape of her mouth to pronounce vowels and consonants and revels in the nuances of word placement and the softness, magic and music of the language. Her thoughts on French take the author from translating baseball terms, to a discussion of the effects of language on behavior, to a comparison of Pittsburgh and Paris. She even tries composing poetry, following the rules of French neoclassicism. Her life is not without tragic, heart-wrenching events, yet she continues to find joy in the refuge and haven of the French language.
A charming, thoughtful book for lovers of Paris, the French language or good writing.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59571-370-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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