A witty and engaging history of one of American modernism’s great monuments. Back in the days when magazines were important, few were devoured more avidly by the cognoscenti than the Smart Set during the tenure of coeditors H.L. Mencken and noted drama critic George Jean Nathan, who took over in 1914. Proclaiming that “one civilized reader was worth a thousand boneheads,” Mencken and Nathan engaged in a full-scale assault on American nativism, naivetÇ, and knee-jerk puritanism. Their weapons were scorn, sarcasm, and outright mockery as well as a fierce dedication to high culture and the avant-garde. F. Scott Fitzgerald was an early discovery, as was Eugene O’Neill. James Joyce even made his American debut in the magazine. The two editors were complementary in almost everything, even their eccentricities. Believing that culture was far above futile political struggles, they kept all mention of WW I out of the magazine. As Nathan wrote: “If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow and if half of Russia were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least. . . . Life, as I see it, is for the fortunate few.” This kind of militant, irreverent aestheticism appalled the “booboisie” but wowed the cosmopolitans. Finally, after ten successful years, Mencken and Nathan began to feel that the magazine was running out of steam. To propound their ideas properly, they needed a completely new forum’so with the backing of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, they started the American Mercury. Stripped of its stars, the Smart Set managed to struggle on a few more years before finally going under during the Depression. Curtiss (Von Stroheim, 1971) is every bit as smart and stylish as his subject. His excellent biographical portrait of the so often overshadowed Nathan is particularly notable. A graceful, richly detailed delight. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55783-312-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Applause
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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