An attractively illustrated coffee-table doodad, billed by novelist Trevor as "a writer's journey, a tour of places which other writers have felt affection for also, or have known excitement or alarm in"—but mostly a string of excerpts from Irish literature, from the Tain to the present, having vaguely to do with the landscape. The chronological presentation seems a fundamental mistake, since it suggests the very sort of academic investigation Trevor disclaims as an objective; only in the final chapter—a whirlwind clockwise tour around the island—does the organizational premise work. Many of the literary references are predictable: Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village"; Allingham's "The Winding Banks of Erne"; Yeats on Coole Park; Synge on Wicklow and the Aran Islands; O'Sullivan on the Blaskets; Joyce and O'Casey, from their different vantage points, on Dublin; MacNeice on Belfast. But Trevor covers some other, more overlooked bases as well: Jonathan Swift and the 18th-century garden; the S. C. Halls' early Victorian "picturesque" travel book about Ireland; John Banim; the "vastly" overlooked short stories of George Moore (though, oddly, Trevor includes no excerpts from Moore's The Untilled Field); Ulster novelist Forrest Reid. Some writers appear awkwardly fitted into the "landscape" category (Flann O'Brien's inclusion on the ground that his Dublin was "a playground for the imagination" seems a bit thin); and Trevor's virtual exclusion of excerpts from the original work of contemporary writers impoverishes the book by the omission of (for example) Seamus Heaney. Some fine raw material—seemingly thrown together.
Pub Date: March 17, 1984
ISBN: 0500013225
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1984
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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