For children’s-literature researchers after the eclectic and esoteric, the price is right.
Published as a companion to editor Terras’ monograph, Picture-Book Professors (2018), which analyzes depictions of professors in illustrated children’s books, this anthology introduces 21st-century readers to 26 professors from stories published between 1871 and 1933.
Most of these characters are likely to be new to even scholars of children’s literature; aside from Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, E. Nesbit, and L. Frank Baum, authors included are almost certain to be obscure to most American lay readers. Befitting the collection’s role as adjunct to Terras’ scholarship, many selections are mere excerpts from longer works. Some are so targeted to the depictions of the professor highlighted that any sense of narrative is entirely lost, as in the bits and bobs from four separate Little Jack Rabbit tales by David Cory. In these, readers meet professor Jim Crow, who mostly appears to read snatches from his “little Black Book” or “little Wisdom Book” to the bunny protagonist before flying off. Some short stories are reprinted in full, offering both some narrative satisfaction and fascinating glimpses into bygone times and mores. Readers will be astonished, for instance, at the implied workings of primitive telephony in Frank R. Stockton’s “The Curious History of a Message,” published in St. Nicholas in 1888. Also lending insight is the frequently “colonialist, racist and sexist” language preserved in many of these tales, which occasions both a blanket warning in the book’s introduction and specific warnings where appropriate in the contextualizing note that precedes each piece. U.S. readers sensitized to the demeaning association of simians with black people will remark that no such gloss accompanies the excerpt from Barrington MacGregor’s King Longbeard, featuring the foolishly self-important professor Entellus Hanuman Semnopithicus A.P.E.; it is also silent on the appropriation of the Hindu deity Hanuman to name this object of ridicule. Children are not the target or the likely audience of this collection, but caregivers moved to share this open-access work should take note.
For children’s-literature researchers after the eclectic and esoteric, the price is right.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9928581-7-9
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Fincham Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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