The great playwright exchanges letters with his favorite American stage director. In 1955 Alan Schneider was invited to direct the American production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. He went to London to meet the playwright beforehand, and a warm, productive relationship soon developed, ending only with Schneider’s accidental death in 1984. (He was fatally struck by a car while walking to a mailbox, intending to post a letter to Beckett.) Their correspondence—279 letters from Beckett, 209 from Schneider—is of partcular interest in matters of Beckett’s stagecraft and self-interpretation. Because of Beckett’s confidence in him, Schneider was privileged to premiere five of the Nobelist’s works in the US, including Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Endgame. The notoriously demanding playwright favored Schneider, as Maurice Harmon (Anglo-Irish Literature/ University Coll., Dublin) explains in his concisely excellent introduction, because Schneider “did not intrude upon the work but submitted himself attentively to it, discovering its imaginative inner life, most pleased in the end if his contribution to the play’s successful performance could be unnoticed.” Schneider honored Beckett’s intentions scrupulously. Consequently, Beckett is in his letters most forthcoming about his wishes and intentions for his plays. Scrupulous, too, is editor Harmon who supplies useful and thorough notes for each letter. Taken together, the Beckett-Schneider letters also offer a unique overview of Beckett’s stage work in the US. Apart from their detailed discussion of the plays that Beckett entrusted to Schneider, we are privy to their expert comments on the successes and failures of other Beckett productions here and abroad. The tone is warm and friendly throughout, yet the letters are curiously uninteresting in any regard except theater matters. A well-edited set of documents that will be uniquely invaluable to students of Beckett’s works and of the American theater. (21 line illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-674-62522-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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