Forget the travel angle and just enjoy this as a sampler of notable Irish prose and poetry, old and new.
A strained marriage of Irish literature and travelogue.
Anthologist Cahill (A Literary Guide to Ireland) discovered Ireland on her honeymoon and has kept returning to it ever since, both as tourist and editor. The present work, in which her aim has been to select writings that evoke specific places and which she describes as “a feast of writing and landscape,” unfortunately just doesn’t jell. Starting in Dublin, she moves successively through the provinces of Leinster, Munster, Connaught, and finally Ulster. Cahill includes well-known writers (such as Swift, Joyce, Beckett, and O’Casey) as well as newer, less familiar names (the poet Eavan Boland and the columnist Nuala O’Faolain, for example). She introduces contributors with brief essays on relevant aspects of their life and work, prefaces each selection with a short explanation of its context, and then appends a traveler’s guide to sites connected with each excerpt. The guides are quite explicit, including bus route numbers, driving directions, and detailed walking tours, with instructions on when to turn right or left and what buildings to look for. Some writers, such as Joyce and Synge, are represented by multiple selections, others by a single short piece. Not surprisingly, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes is included to evoke Limerick, and Belfast is recalled in a piece by Brian Moore. Less accountable is her choice of a passage from her husband Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization that features a prayer by St. Patrick. Adventurous souls following the traveler’s guides will find themselves in Neolithic archeological digs at Lough Gur, and at such unlikely tourist spots as Roddy Doyle’s north Dublin working-class neighborhood and the rough Cork streets of Frank O’Connor—as well as the picturesque Aran Islands, the mountains of Kerry, and Galway Bay.
Forget the travel angle and just enjoy this as a sampler of notable Irish prose and poetry, old and new.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-43419-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
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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