On that front, mission accomplished: Philbrick is an enthusiastic salesman for a sometimes daunting novel.
A slim celebration of the elements of a literary masterpiece—and its moody, obsessive author.
In his 2000 book, In the Heart of the Sea, historian Philbrick (The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of Little Bighorn, 2010, etc.) detailed the wreck of the Essex, a whaling ship that would become the model for the Pequod in Herman Melville’s 1851 classic, Moby-Dick. Having read the novel more than a dozen times, he’s inspired to undertake a brief study of what he feels makes the book so enduring. (However, it took a while to earn classic status, as he points out; a flop when it was first published, the book didn’t earn the esteem of critics until after World War I.) The diversity of the crew and Melville’s respect for each character anticipates decades of debates about racial tolerance, writes the author, and its interest in matters of religious truth, demagoguery and free enterprise ensure that American readers today can find resonances with contemporary social and political issues. But Philbrick isn’t simply hunting for proof of the novel’s ongoing “relevance.” He praises Melville’s acute understanding of “the microclimates of intimate human relations,” takes a close look at some of the novel’s more powerfully poetic passages and honors the Melville himself, who was plagued with self-doubt while writing the book. Melville’s letters to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne—which Philbrick argues are essential to understanding Moby-Dick—reveal the novelist to be struggling with the composition of the novel as well as the spiritual concerns he addressed in it. Philbrick constructs the narrative in brief chapters, often no more than a couple of pages, and his literary analysis is sometimes thin. However, he doesn’t want to dwell long on the book’s contents, but rather motivate readers to discover the book for themselves.
On that front, mission accomplished: Philbrick is an enthusiastic salesman for a sometimes daunting novel.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02299-1
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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