Naipaul is still Naipaul. But he isn’t especially well served by a very uneven volume that really seems to have been hastily...
This miscellany of essays and reviews is a pendant to the 2001 Nobel laureate’s recent Between Father and Son: Family Letters (2000) and The Writer and the World (2002).
The contents, introduced and edited by novelist Pankaj Mishra, appear in microcosm in the 1998 prologue, “Reading and Writing,” which briefly surveys Naipaul’s upbringing in his native Trinidad, accession to understanding of his family’s Indian heritage, and early literary enthusiasms and efforts. Further information (and, unfortunately, numbing repetition) appears in three personal essays capped by a lengthy, fascinating “Fragment of an Autobiography” (1982), which is very informative about the use Naipaul made of neighbors and acquaintances as models for characters in his first book, Miguel Street, and the powerful influence of his father Seepersad, a hardworking journalist and modestly gifted writer of short stories whose inability to realize his literary goals condemned him to increasing and debilitating “hysteria . . . [and] fear of extinction.” There follow forewords to his father’s single published book and to a later edition of Naipual’s 1961 masterpiece A House for Mr. Biswas. Next, thoughtful reviews of “Indian Autobiographies” (including Mohandas Ghandi’s) and of a new biography of Rudyard Kipling (whom Naipaul greatly admired), followed by “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” a penetrating analysis of the blending of romance and realism in the work of the writer to whom Naipaul is perhaps most indebted and akin. Finally, a postscript consisting of Naipaul’s Nobel acceptance speech (“Two Worlds”), which repeats biographical details already present in preceding pages, but does re-emphasize the outsider’s “caste sense” that made him feel alienated from the “worlds” of literary culture and a career-long reliance on “intuition” as opposed to agendas or ideologies (“I have no guiding political idea”). The writing is, as expected, consistently eloquent and astute—but even sympathetic readers will grow weary of hammer-blow repetitions of the same central points.
Naipaul is still Naipaul. But he isn’t especially well served by a very uneven volume that really seems to have been hastily assembled rather than carefully edited.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41517-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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