A fascinating exploration stylishly and gracefully told.
An illuminating look at the origins and impact of writing.
In this richly detailed cultural history, Battles (The Sovereignties of Invention, 2012, etc.), associate director of the research group metaLAB at Harvard, traces the evolution of writing from cuneiform in the fourth millennium B.C. to digital communications. Emerging as an accounting system in Mesopotamia, writing became evidence of power as well as a means of personal expression. It also changed the human mind; writing “exploits (and transforms) circuits in our brains….Writing teaches our brains to do all kinds of somersaults and tricks.” Besides communicating immediate needs, writing allows for the transmission of cultural knowledge, bears witness to the past, and influences the future. All writing, Battles has discovered, is composed of “lines that cross, connect, and loop, and they arrange themselves into linear sets,” whether it takes the form of Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Greek, Sanskrit, or Cyrillic alphabets. Battles underscores the way writing shapes reading and thinking: “in the form of word and sentence, chapter and verse,” he asserts, “writing teaches.” The author highlights several texts as especially significant, including the saga Gilgamesh, unearthed from clay tablets, which imparted lessons about kingship and heroism that influenced later literature; and the Bible, which “hides its own writing from us in a haze of myths and mystical formulae.” Before the printing press, hand copying made all books—including the Bible—vulnerable to changes: “Each instance of book production was a reading, and an editing.” Movable type changed the production and availability of books, but early printed volumes allowed for ample margins so that illuminators could ply their craft. Battles deftly excavates layers of human history from a wide range of sources to reveal that writing “is always palimpsestic; there is no setting-down that is not a setting-among, a setting-upon.”
A fascinating exploration stylishly and gracefully told.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-05885-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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