Useful for scholars and for admirers of Warren’s work who are very familiar with the author’s life and career. (b&w...
Ten years of essentially unrevealing letters from a formative period of the poet and novelist best known for All the King’s Men and as the first Poet Laureate of the United States.
This first in a series of volumes of Warren’s letters planned by editor Clark (English/Texas A&M) covers Warren’s college years, including undergraduate terms at Vanderbilt University and graduate studies at Berkeley, Yale, and Oxford (the last as a Rhodes scholar). The events in that period include an early suicide attempt, an abortive love affair (with a woman code-named “Albatross”), a collegiate scandal involving allegations that women were seen leaving his lodgings early in the morning, amused disdain for the politics and petty conflicts of the college community, and a commitment to poetry that was remarkable even in the midst of the burgeoning Southern literary renaissance (which would include many of the recipients of these letters). Chief among Warren’s correspondents was poet and critic Allen Tate, to whom Warren confided both personal and literary concerns, mailing carbon copies of his poems for Tate to criticize, and in turn commenting on Tate’s work. That pattern prevails with most of his letters to peers, as his correspondence expands to include critics, publishers, editors and other academics. The self-conscious collegiate cynicism fades away fairly quickly, making way for literate, sometimes charming (if often perfunctory) comments on his own and others’ work and lives. Only one letter to his wife Cinima Brescia, notable for its feeling, is included (few are extant); numerous letters to editors (often requesting money) round out the last chapter. The explanatory notes do not adequately fill in the gaps always left when only one side of a correspondence is presented.
Useful for scholars and for admirers of Warren’s work who are very familiar with the author’s life and career. (b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8071-2536-9
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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