Uneven but emotional, grateful and often wise.
Acclaimed playwright Shange (Ellington Was Not a Street, 2004, etc.) offers a collection of personal essays dealing with anger, pride, creativity, family, identity, mental health and love.
The author, who also writes poetry, children’s books and novels, visits just about every human emotion in these pieces, which date from various decades in her life. In some, she employs her idiosyncratic spelling (waz, enuf), capitalization (none) and punctuation (minimal), but the later pieces adhere to more conventional mechanics—though never to conventional ideas. Her anger is evident throughout—from patronizing whites to black rappers (whose misogynistic lyrics and ideas she equates with the vileness that produced slavery) to the silence of black male intellectuals, whom she accuses of sanctioning rappers’ misogyny. She writes informatively about the genesis of her most famous work of dram for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, examines her personal history for her love of language, dance and music and confesses, near the end, that she actually likes men—though she believes that most of them have one goal in mind with women. Among her most affecting pieces are two short essays about her parents, one for each. Her father was a physician, and Shange writes emotionally about his love of music and his exuberant dancing with her mother. She recalls hiding in her mother’s closet, absorbing her. She includes a promising piece about learning other languages, but spoils it with chunks of block quotations that effectively silence her voice and still her rhythm, as well as a touching poem addressed to an unnamed young poet. Along the way, Shange offers glimpses of her visits to a shrink, though she does not provide any clinical diagnosis, just some hints of malaise and unhappiness.
Uneven but emotional, grateful and often wise.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-20616-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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