Erudite, stylish, and lively, steeped in first-hand experience and a pleasure to read.
Diverse collection of essays on topics ranging from 18th-century explorers to monasteries and butterflies, all of which Merwin makes fascinating.
His prose, glinting and gracious, pulses with the warmth that comes from being truly captivated by a subject. At times poet/novelist Merwin (The Lost Upland, 1992, etc.) writes like an eye roving the surroundings: “I approached Xenophontos from behind: it faces the sea. Ruined stables extending back into the trees. Masonry built of boulders: gray, russet, black. Lichens.” At other times he’s more leisurely and thorough, for example in his profile of Sydney Parkinson, who circumnavigated the globe on Cook’s Endeavour, and in his musings about the ill-fated expedition of French explorer La Pérouse, which tie together the French town of Albi and the Hawaiian island of Maui as neatly as a birthday present. The collection starts with an affectionate remembrance of George Kirstein, publisher of The Nation, with whom Merwin had a lifelong, at times tattered relationship; the essay ranges over sailing, aspects of emotional remoteness, and Kirstein's gradual distancing from the rebelliousness of youth. In one piece, Merwin grabs the reader's attention from the first sentence (“A few yards away, in the tall fir trees beyond a shallow fold that ran up the mountainside, there were thirty-five million butterflies”); in others, he sidles along in an oblique manner, slowly getting at the mystery of Neanderthals in the valley of the Dordogne or the way the ruins of a royal Hawaiian summer house speak of the devastating loss of species on those islands. He also recreates a time, to the envy of contemporary readers, when you could go exploring, knowing there would be an abandoned barn in which to sleep, when you could take to Mt. Athos on foot and with rucksack, visiting the monasteries as one should, via a slow crawl.
Erudite, stylish, and lively, steeped in first-hand experience and a pleasure to read.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59376-030-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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