We expect anything and everything from Robert Graves, but even so it's a little difficult to think of him addressing the London School of Economics or our own Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1963 he lectured at both places, respectively on money ("Mammon") and science ("Nine Hundred Iron Chariots"). In dealing with these subjects his technique is typically Gravesian: a deep brew of etymological and historical probings, a collection of cross-references from the literary past to the most Journalistic present, an admission with Socratic irony that he knows nothing about such-and-such, and then a startling summation in which poetic myth and a matriarchal culture are somehow seen to be the only refuge for modern man. With his wit, his Olympian lucidity, and his mischievous asides, he disarms the reader or listener, leaving only the haziest suspicion of legerdemain or irrelevancy. His "Three Oxford Lectures on Poetry," especially the last, "The Poet in a Valley of Dry Bones," are among the wisest and most biting of his discussions concerning craft, sensibility and inspiration, while "Intimations of the Black Goddess" investigates his own (and generally most recent) poetry against the background of myth, the man-woman relationship, the dictates of the White Goddess and so forth- a complex affair about which one expects Graves will soon have much more to say. The two remaining essays, "Real Women" and "Moral Principles in Translation," are lesser efforts. An admirable gathering.
Pub Date: June 18, 1965
ISBN: 0304923656
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1965
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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