An engaging memoir of life at Oxford University in the 50's, by the prolific—and blind—Indian-born Mehta (The Stolen Light, 1989, etc.). When Mehta was growing up in India, Oxford was regarded as the training ground of prime ministers, the ``holiest of holy places of pilgrimage,'' but the author arrived there circuitously, via high school in Arkansas and Pomona College in California. Oxford was in a curious transition in the 50's, with seventy percent of its undergraduates supported by scholarships yet residing in glamorous suites of rooms (Mehta lived in rooms that had been previously used by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Harold Macmillan), living rather grandly on credit, and celebrating eccentricity, conversation, wit, and the life of the mind (in these days before the sexual revolution, Oxford was essentially a male society). Mehta says that entering Oxford was particularly difficult for Americans, who came into competition with Englishmen who had been subject to intense training in their areas of specialization—and who were intellectually much older, if emotionally much younger, than their Yank counterparts. Meanwhile, Mehta savored the Oxford life: the opportunities to meet the great; the associations with some of the most brilliant students of his generation; the visits to places like Birr Castle in Ireland, with a hundred rooms and ``just the usual footmen, cooks, scullery and sub-scullery maids, and of course, the housekeeper and the butler''; and the dinners at the Thistle Society as a kind of honorary Scot. This isn't, however, a conventional collegiate memoir: Mehta's blindness, feelings of inadequacy, sense of ``years of rejections and disappointments,'' and ultimate failure to get a First Class degree give it a bittersweet, sometimes slightly forced, quality.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03544-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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
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
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