A twilight journal by Nobel Prize winner Milosz (Beginning with My Streets, 1992, etc.), very much concerned with fame, the aging body, his place in Polish literature, and general regrets for mysteries unsolved and unsolvable in the remaining time before death. Daily in 1987 and 1988, Milosz recorded a variety of thoughts and feelings on a wide range of topics: the burning pace of his renown (readings and papers delivered everywhere, a conference on Central Europe in the presence of the Polish Pope); the state of his Berkeley garden (deer keep eating the heliotrope); his health (occasionally poor, usually robust); his recently dead wife (nursed through Alzheimer's at the end, but earlier subject to a misdiagnosed brain tumor); his alienation from contemporary American poets (``American poetry equals an enormous collection of snapshots from which we divine the things observed and the mind of the observer. In his mind we may discover the conviction that `there is nothing to write about' ''); and his ruminations on the body and the soul. About Pope John Paul II Milosz is especially interesting, the Pope being an ex-poet himself. His countryman clearly fascinates Milosz, and scares him a little as well: A shadow of nationalistic messianism peeks from behind what Milosz otherwise approvingly sees as the Pope's moral rigidity. But it is Poland and its faults and strengths that Milosz pays most attention to in this journal. And in light of these, he seems to want to put things finally right with his countrymen vis-Ö-vis himself. Because some if not most of these references are to a time and place and people American readers are far less than familiar with, these sections may be heavy going, and Milosz is not always concisely intelligible. Still, this is an intimate portrait on the whole, more personal than Milosz's prose usually is—a generosity, finally.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-29344-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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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