Fans of historical fiction will have fun with Carnes’s study, and would-be novelists might benefit from having a look at it,...
A sometimes amusing if generally inconsequential set of essays on fiction-writers’ use (and occasional misuse) of history.
Following the model he established with Past Imperfect (1995), Carnes (History/Barnard Coll.) elicits from his scholarly peers comments on representative historical fictions that have been published, mainly, in the last 40 years. In response to their comments come sometimes defensive, sometimes befuddled, and sometimes gracious and grateful remarks by the novelists in question. Historian Elliott West, for instance, notes historical inaccuracies in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, a novel that offers “a virtually full roster of the Western’s most familiar characters” and is thus as mythical as any other horse opera. Blinking at the command to draw, McMurtry answers that “A long novel often involves such sloppiness.” By contrast, when his attention is drawn to inaccuracies in Burr, the famously prickly Gore Vidal goes snide, while William Styron bobs and weaves around Eugene Genovese’s furious jabs at The Confessions of Nat Turner. Annie Dillard, after noted historian Richard White demonstrates her novel The Living to be a mass of misunderstandings and useless inventions, doesn’t bother to respond at all. Neither does Barbara Kingsolver, though her 1998 The Poisonwood Bible stands up pretty well under Dianne Kunz’s fact-testing examination. For the most part, the historians here are gentle—often, in fact, too gentle—with their storytelling subjects, while the novelists respond for the most part with some variant of “Well, I wasn’t writing a dissertation.”
Fans of historical fiction will have fun with Carnes’s study, and would-be novelists might benefit from having a look at it, too—and then double-checking their facts. After all, as historian John Lukacs observes here, “Every novel is a historical novel.”Pub Date: March 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85765-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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