“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” Owen asked in his “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” For Egremont, the poems serve...
Poetry reveals the devastating trajectory of war.
On the centennial anniversary of the start of World War I, historian Egremont (Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, 2011, etc.) considers the intersecting lives and work of 11 British poets who were soldiers and esteemed contributors to the burgeoning genre of war poetry. Many of the author’s subjects are likely to be familiar to readers, including Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves; others, such as Edmund Blunden and Julian Grenfell, are lesser known today. During the war, Egremont writes, “the poets began to be lionized,” invited to give readings in elite salons and sought by publishers. Six chapters focus on each year of war and its aftermath, offering an adroit biographical and historical overview, followed by a selection of poems that chronicle the writers’ spirits, as they changed “from enthusiasm to pitiful weariness,” from hope to disillusion. “Cast away regret and rue,” Charles Sorley wrote in 1914. “Think what you are marching to.” By January 1915, his letter to a friend revealed a deepening sense of dismay: “We don’t seem to be winning, do we? It looks like an affair of years.” A few months later, he began a poem with lines that could have served as his epitaph: “Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat: / Only an empty pail….” In October, aged 20, he was killed by a sniper. Owen, held in high regard by Sassoon, was killed, age 25, in 1918; Brooke, Thomas and Grenfell were already dead. Those who survived—e.g., Sassoon and Graves—“couldn’t leave the war, even if…they wanted to move on.”
“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” Owen asked in his “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” For Egremont, the poems serve as “holy glimmers” of lives lost and as powerful protests against the hell of war.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-28032-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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