Playfulness and gravity mix with quotations and creation in this mélange of styles, tones, and textures.
A veteran novelist and teacher of creative writing offers a salmagundi of ideas for the latest volume in the publisher's “Why x Matters” series.
The author of numerous novels and works of nonfiction, Delbanco (Curiouser and Curiouser: Essays, 2017, etc.), who has taught at Williams College, the University of Michigan, Columbia, and the University of Iowa, among others, returns with a series of diverse arguments to support the title. He begins with a section about teachers who influenced him (both on and off the page), focusing on John Updike, John Gardner, and James Baldwin, and he later notes the popular decline of the Johns and the rise of Baldwin. Delbanco then examines five texts that, he argues, have been enduring influences on “our daily behavior,” including The Communist Manifesto, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and he explores the concepts of originality, plagiarism, and imitation. Among the most original writers, he writes, are Flannery O’Connor and Virginia Woolf. Throughout, Delbanco offers comments about the history of writing and why it is so significant, and he laments the decline of truth in language (Donald Trump receives stern words). Interwoven into the narrative are playful and instructive moments for readers, and the author makes frequent use of famous quotations to support his arguments. In fact, the text is chockablock with quotations—some identified, some not (among the latter, “world enough and time” from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”). Delbanco has a lot to say about teaching and offers some long—sometimes overlong—sequences about a writing seminar (with lengthy offerings by students) and eight pages devoted to the reproduction of a course syllabus he used for many years with his creative writing students.
Playfulness and gravity mix with quotations and creation in this mélange of styles, tones, and textures.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-24597-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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