A fine introduction to a well-chosen canon.
The rich pleasures and profound lessons of literature come alive in this stimulating collection of essays on great novels.
Inviting us to throw down our airport best-sellers and savor the subtle writing, complex characters and psychological insights of time-tested masterpieces, Faulkner, founder of an informal bibliophilic website, gets us started with these engaging critical appreciations of three dozen classics. Faulkner’s selection includes everything from monuments such as Anna Karenina to forgotten gems such as Sigrid Undset’s medieval domestic novel trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, all chosen with a shrewd eye for popular appeal and readability. There’s little modernist alienation here, no Hemingway, Kafka, Roth or Pynchon; but there is lots of Victorian melodrama, both Brontës included, along with 20th-century works that share a realist aesthetic and humanist ideals, from E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View to the Harry Potter series. Each chapter examines three works in the light of an intriguing reader-involvement theme; Chapter Nine, “Chick-Lit for Grownups,” gleans challenging relationship advice from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Anne Tyler’s Celestial Navigations. (But take heart, lads: “Action Figures” plumbs the tests of manhood in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.) The snappy but thoughtful essays contain plot synopses, author bios and critical assessments, along with fun factoids—Victor Hugo, we learn, became the deity of the Vietnamese Buddhist Cao Dai sect—and provocative book-group discussion questions. (Tom Sawyer prompts the brow-furrower, “Have we lost something in the attempt to eradicate bad behavior in boys?”) Faulkner’s readings of the classics are sympathetic but sharp-eyed and alive to both philosophical content and literary quality; she teases out the gray-shaded moral ambiguities of Vanity Fair while celebrating its vibrant social whirl, laughs at the sentimentality of Dickens’ dying-child scenes while registering their emotional power. Like any good critic, she makes readers want to hit the books.
A fine introduction to a well-chosen canon.Pub Date: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1453508114
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
