Reads like an enthusiastic (often fun, but rambling) 200-page college newspaper article.
Remember when Ozzy Osbourne was a pretty good metalhead, not a henpecked reality-show goofball? Paul Wilkinson does.
Fronted by the charismatic Osbourne, Black Sabbath was one of the first successful purveyors of heavy metal. Although Sabbath later devolved into a rock-‘n’-roll parody (can you say Spinal Tap?), during its early years the U.K. four-man band could destroy your speakers with as much aplomb as any group of the era save Led Zeppelin. In his engaging debut, Brit scribe/musician Wilkinson takes a loving look at the group’s first six albums: Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality, Vol. 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage. He makes a convincing case that these are indeed classics with in-depth, often hilarious dissection of the records that alternate with chapters featuring Sabbath history, British history and personal history. It’s risky for an author to work himself into a biography such as this, but Wilkinson is a charmer, armed with anecdotes galore (e.g., the night his 15-year-old babysitter attempted to seduce him). As the author is also a guitarist, it makes sense that he gives many props to Tony Iommi, “often hailed as the greatest ever composer of guitar riffs.” Non-musicians may find Wilkinson’s song-by-song analysis a tad on the geeky side, but he remedies that (sort of) by including a glossary of “all the fancy technical nomenclature used in this book.” (Betcha didn’t know the end of “War Pigs” provides an example of accelerando.) At times, the book buckles under the weight of minutiae: Do we really need to know Sabbath’s entire tour schedule from April 1970? We trust the author will avoid this rookie mistake in the future.
Reads like an enthusiastic (often fun, but rambling) 200-page college newspaper article.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36723-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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