The last in the series of Trilling's collected works, this grabbag of previously uncollected oddments—reviews, questionnaire responses, transcribed scholarly addresses—provides some interesting changes of shading in the portrait of the good gray moderate Force of the Fifties. "There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate," Trilling the Marxist writes in 1930—at the same time resisting seeing in Dos Passos' U.S.A. the greatest thing since the Song of Songs. As a Jew, Trilling protests against the stacked-deck moralizing of Ludwig Lewisohn; a few years later, he's basically declaring himself as denatured of the Tribe as possibly can be. Trilling's real faith seemed to be in refinements, especially two: a stalwart liberalism (refined out of Marxism) and orthodox Freudianism (Judaism's offshoot?). When he writes here about the punishing beauties of society (as he does with almost fearful respect in two fine short appreciations of Fitzgerald and O'Hara) or the beautiful punishment of psychoanalysis (knowledgeable nods toward Jones' Life of Freud and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death), he is in his tinkering element: in the forces of social and neurotic life, everything is in the state of constant, liquid adjustment Trilling's temperament felt most comfortable with. He stubbornly resists (not once but twice) Partisan Review enquiries—PR's old flank-tightening hunger for alignments—with these words: "I think it is useless and even harmful to spend time in formulating a clear and distinct idea of the literary weather—either you're embarked or you're not embarked. If you are embarked, the weather report can only tell you you're a fool." Uncharacteristically blunt and playful, this is the voice of a tinkering moderate with his nap up. Widow Diana Trilling contributes an anecdotal afterward, mostly biographical, which is only interesting. Minor, leftover Trilling—for completeness only.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1980
ISBN: 015184710X
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1980
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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