Displays in abundance the author’s astonishing ability to listen to—and record in prose that approaches perfect—the music of...
In a motley collection of previously published pieces, novelist and essayist Lopate examines with unique intelligence and an unforgiving eye everything from the smell of his navel to a film by Godard.
The volume begins playfully with “Notes Toward an Introduction,” which the author never completed due to an untimely death (fear not: he lives). Fortunately, Lopate (Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, 1998, etc.) quickly abandons this unnecessary inanity and proceeds to offer evidence why he is one of America’s most admired essayists. The 29 pieces form a sort of rough memoir, beginning with a reminiscence of his early years of school (his first grade teacher had a glass eye) and concluding with a wrenching description of the death of his father in 1995, followed by a brief mediation on love serving as a sort of encore. Some of these essays are—or soon will be—classics of the genre. “Samson and Delilah and the Kids,” which considers the impact on his own life of both the biblical and Cecil B. DeMille versions of this classic battle of the sexes, is a brilliant instance of how research and scholarship can illuminate the most intimate of concerns. A piece about his infatuation with a Korean woman appears in some ways to be a transcript of everyman’s imagination. Lopate can wax silly (he writes about shaving a beard and buying a cat and shushing noisy people in movie theaters), somber (he tells about the deaths of colleagues, one by suicide, another by cancer), bemused (he wonders why a relationship with a woman named Claire never seemed to ignite), and (fortunately not often) a tad self-righteous. One of his longest, most tedious narratives tells about a production of Uncle Vanya he once mounted with elementary-school children: it turned out wonderfully, and everyone learned ever so much. Thank goodness this is not typical.
Displays in abundance the author’s astonishing ability to listen to—and record in prose that approaches perfect—the music of his own thoughts as he sometimes stumbles, sometimes glides through life.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-465-04173-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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