With a simplicity of language belying a deeply rich and subtle imagery, novelist Olmstead (American by Land, 1993, etc.) produces a variegated narrative, dreamlike in its reflection of passing youth yet rooted in the earthy prose of farm life, and always achingly hued by an 18-year-old's nascent awareness of mortality. "Memory is always more true to the present mind than to the past," writes Olmstead, "always more true to itself than to anything else." Looking back at his life on his grandfather's New Hampshire dairy farm, Olmstead presents that late adolescent moment when change was imminent but just barely forestalled. Soon to come would be the untimely deaths of his two childhood friends, his father's passing following a long unhappy spiral of alcoholism and failed rehabilitation, and the slow, cancerous death of his grandfather. But also here is Olmstead's initiatory, bittersweet love affair, often described in synesthetic terms, as is much of this perceptive account: "I knew no one who spoke as she did, knew no one whose words were like touch." As can only be fathomed by the adult narrator, there are impending changes in the younger man's life, although the teenager has the wit to infer these changes in the aging of the old farm hands, the dismantling of an ancient grain silo, and the final gathering of his grandfather's siblings on word of the old man's disease. The daily prosaisms among the family and with the hired help are gently humorous yet ineluctably tinged with regret over the transience of familiar things. As the teenager gazes upon his love, he notes, "And then I'd remember how we were in a seam of life on this very day and would soon be pulled from it by our ambitions, by the roads we were on." Written with great-hearted love and compassion in a language full of human longing and frailty, this is a book for anyone who was once young.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-4162-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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