Elegantly written—and elegantly imagined—critical essays on literature and the love it breeds; by the octogtenarian American poet laureate. Ranging over half of his literary life, from the 1940's to the present, these selected essays show off Warren as the versatile man of belles-lettres that he is. Sandwiched between opening and closing meditative essays on poetry are easy-moving studies of literary heavyweights and answers to timeless questions about books. In "Why Do We Read Fiction?," Warren answers, "because we like it," looking to novels not for "meaning" but escape. He does find meaning elsewhere, in Hemingway, for example, where the "shadow of ruin" behind his stories is given yet another new turn. In "Hawthorne Revisited," Warren wriggles out "the irremediable askewness of life" from The Scarlet Letter. A bio-graphically minded essay on Twain matches up the contradictions of the life and the writing and refreshes understanding of the pure "expression" of his language. Elsewhere, Warren takes up the overlooked. "Melville the Poet" rescues his verse from obscurity and opprobrium, and a long, reflective essay on Whittier incites some strong, old feelings on abolitionism. Other tributes go out to John Crowe Ransom and Robert Frost; Warren has almost nothing bad to say about anyone. The book ends with his well-known 1946 essay on Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Like everything else here, it still stands up and merits rereading. No slips of taste or shoddy judgments, yet no surprises, either. Just great, old-fashioned musing by a brilliant man.
Pub Date: March 29, 1989
ISBN: 394-57516-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
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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