Guilt, power, desire and sadism all feature in Rudenstine’s authoritative, meticulously close reading of what he considers...
A new appraisal of Shakespeare’s lyric poetry.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” is a familiar first line from "Sonnet 18," one of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. Although it is considered to be a love poem, Rudenstine (The House of Barnes: The Man, the Collection, the Controversy, 2012, etc.), an Elizabethan scholar and former Harvard president, argues that taking any sonnet out of sequence distorts its meaning. He sees the lyric poems as interconnected, building a dramatic narrative about a poet’s fraught relationship with a young man he loves and a mistress whom the two men lustily desire. Love, surely, is a theme, but it is a love undermined by faithlessness and deceit, vulnerability and humiliation. Rudenstine groups the sonnets (all appended to his text) into discrete sections that trace the development of themes: the so-called “marriage poems” (1-20) speak to the love between the poet and his younger, wealthier and handsomer friend. In the next group, the poet praises the friend, who has been unfaithful and abandons the poet but begs forgiveness. The friend takes up with the poet’s mistress, the poet questions his own talent and, fearing abandonment by the young man, “embarks on a full attack…on the friend’s character.” Subsequent sonnets chronicle a tumultuous relationship of reconciliation, betrayal, reunion and renewed proclamations of love. The last sonnets speak to the mistress’s “love-kindling fire” in the hearts—and bodies—of both men. Rudenstine handles gingerly some scholars’ assertion of the possibility of a homosexual relationship between the poet and his friend. While that inference can be supported, the author sees the relationship as a magnetic infatuation, not necessarily sexual, that “beguiles and overwhelms” the poet, causing him to “re-create and sustain it, in spite of continual betrayals.”
Guilt, power, desire and sadism all feature in Rudenstine’s authoritative, meticulously close reading of what he considers to be Shakespeare’s majestic poems.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-28015-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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