Every school needs a Foxfire project of its own. Here’s a blueprint and instruction manual, as well as ideal bedside reading...
A combined scrapbook, best-of anthology and nostalgic look backward celebrating the homespun birth of the Foxfire empire.
Empire isn’t far from the mark, for in the 1970s, the Foxfire series of books edited by the since-disgraced Appalachian teacher Eliot Wigginton and his students became bibles for back-to-the-landers, especially in the South, and sold by the armload. Wigginton began the project as a practical way to get his students interested in writing, and so he put them to work going beyond the confines of the exclusive school and into the mountains of northeastern Georgia, gathering stories from and about the lives of local people. As the current crop of editors note at several points, that was precisely the time of Deliverance, which was emphatically not good press for the area, though it had its uses—as banjoist Wallace Crowe recalls, “Although it was bad on one hand, it was good for bluegrass music because now if someone hears the banjo, that’s what they are reminded of.” Foxfire and its successor volumes did much to redeem Southern Appalachia from dark images of toothlessness and fallen logs. As with those volumes, this anniversary commemorative offers both theory and practice, the latter ranging from how to live on practically nothing to the fine arts of tying knots, building sleds, caning a chair and raising azaleas from seed. Highlights abound, including an interview with an agriculture inspector who warns of faux-organic stuff on the market, a profile of a local who recalls, “You either moonshined or you sold corn to moonshiners,” and a slew of truly scary ghost stories that would do M.R. James proud.
Every school needs a Foxfire project of its own. Here’s a blueprint and instruction manual, as well as ideal bedside reading for those seeking the simple life.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-74259-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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