Makes up for 12 months’ worth of missed magazines in one fell swoop.
Guest editor Orlean shakes some dust off this valuable 20-year-old series, serving up a tasty sampler of the year’s more ruminative writing.
As series editor Robert Atwan notes in his forward, the essay was considered essentially dead when the first volume appeared in 1985, an assumption vigorously refuted here. Given Orlean’s long association with the New Yorker, it’s hardly surprising that 7 of her 25 selections first appeared there; it’s also more than justified, as the magazine was having a particularly fecund year, and she’s identified the cream of that excellent crop. Pieces from David Remnick’s fiefdom include Catherine Schine’s heartbreaking “Dog Trouble,” about what happens when a dog owner reaches the end of her leash; David Sedaris’s “Old Faithful,” in which a lanced boil becomes a metaphor for togetherness; and Ian Frazier’s zippy ode to forgetfulness, “If Memory Doesn’t Serve.” Harper’s contributes two treasures: Jonathan Lethem’s “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn,” a poignant memory-poem about the Brooklyn subway stop of his childhood that metastasizes into a miniature history of the whole subway system and by extension New York itself; and Kitty Burns Florey’s delightfully geeky “Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog,” which sings the nearly lost delights of diagramming sentences. Many of the pieces concern the authors’ little joys, which are then spun into larger tapestries of linguistic pleasure. This is an almost unseemly happy book, with a few exceptions. In “The Sea of Information” (from the Kenyon Review), Andrea Barrett details research for a historical novel, funded by a fellowship that began in New York City on September 10, 2001. In “Consider the Lobster,” originally published in Gourmet, David Foster Wallace travels to the Maine Lobster Festival and vigorously shakes until all the lies drop right out of the lobster, and ultimately the meat industry. Two essays heavily reference the late Julia Child—and who could have a problem with that?
Makes up for 12 months’ worth of missed magazines in one fell swoop.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-35712-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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