Highbrow self-help for heterosexual women over 30.
In this absurdly titled little work, a poet and biographer of women (The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out, not reviewed; English/Univ. of Toronto) retells the old story of a woman’s obsessive passion for a self-centered man, then meditates on its themes.
It’s a familiar story: a woman with nothing to lose meets the one; they have an intense and delicious affair; she ends up heartbroken. In this modern version, shorn of Medea’s vengeance and Dido’s melodrama, Sullivan’s brief narrative provides points of entry for a sequence of episodic essays, most juxtaposing romantic fictions with factual love affairs: Dante and Beatrice, Sartre and Beauvoir, Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys. The prose, simple, intimate, and direct, and the quietly confident imagery lend force and clarity to a few salient observations about the trap of romantic obsession. But the overall effect is thin and inconsequential. Sullivan negotiates the turns between bits of memoir, biography, belles-lettres, and feminist pop psychology well enough, but each of these genres, except possibly the last, demands a depth or rigor that just isn’t there. The choice of texts is too arbitrary (not a syllable of Shakespeare), the thinking too shallow, the analysis too sloppy (the section on Charlotte Brontë gets wrong both an important plot element and the sequence in which two works were written) to convey either intellectual or scholarly authority. Despite some autobiographical passages, the writing is not intensely personal enough to carry the punch of an idiosyncratic self. So pop psychology wins after all: Sullivan ends with a coda to the original story that amounts to nothing more than a self-esteem lesson in the mode of Ms., circa 1985. And while it may seem unfair to criticize a study so small for neglecting women’s passion for other women, the consistency of that neglect in writing that purports to be about “women” in general grows tiresome.
Highbrow self-help for heterosexual women over 30.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58243-177-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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