Penn has emerged as an important presence on the Native American literary front, and this collection does a generally good...
A mixed bag of essays by the Nez Perce writer on Native American literature, academic life, and other intellectual topics.
Penn (English/Michigan State Univ.; All My Sins Are Relatives, 1995, etc.) does honor to the trickster characters Rabbit, Frog, and Coyote with these broadsides, which range from highly personal memoirs to formal, sometimes stilted literary analyses, which make use of sometimes simultaneous, sometimes conflicting voices; ego, superego, and alter ego all have a chance to speak, and they can make quite a din. At their best, the essays punch current notions of political correctness and academic protocol square in the chops, as Penn counts coup on stuffy deans, rad-lib separatists, guilty white liberals, conservative columnists (especially the hapless George Will), and semiliterate undergrads. Penn wreaks havoc with a smile or a sneer, as when he twits the dominant culture for ennobling all Indians, forgetting that there are degrees of quality and sophistication to differentiate the work of, say, James Welch from, say, Sherman Alexie, and when he repudiates postmodern approaches to literature (“in order to have the ‘post-modern,’ one needs a foreshortened sense of time and importance. . . . [T]he price for seeing this way, for aspiring to and even achieving this narrowed depth, is boredom”). At their worst, the essays fall into the expected Indians/good honkies/bad cant (“what do you call a white Christian who pretends to accede to the Ten Commandments and yet lusts after power and closeted fellatio with adolescent girls or who kills directly or indirectly every day”), a scattershot approach that lowers the average. Still, it’s an entertainment to watch Penn as he escapes being pinned down, taking up apparently contradictory positions—and even putting in a mild good word for George Armstrong Custer—just for the fun of it all, making friends and foes alike sweat a little.
Penn has emerged as an important presence on the Native American literary front, and this collection does a generally good job of showing why that should be so.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-3731-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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