Sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet, always intelligent and graceful.
A Croatian novelist and essayist (Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream, 1995) now living in voluntary exile o’erglances the current literary landscape and does not care for the view.
In these 31 essays (completed between 1996 and 2000), Ugresic looses a variety of arrows from her rhetorical quiver, among them a sharp sense of irony, a keen sense of humor, and an edged contempt for the banality (and pervasiveness) of contemporary American culture. Some of the pieces are crisp and concise (especially early in the volume); others proceed at a more leisurely pace. And she has a number of points she makes repeatedly. Examples: There is no longer a distinction between “high” and “low” literature (only between literature that sells and literature that doesn’t). Writers are no longer a distinct species, not when celebrities (Joan Collins, Monica Lewinsky) and criminals and crackpots can write their ways to the top of the bestseller list. (Ugresic alludes three times to Collins’s oeuvre.) Writing today has become ever more outrageous, violent, sexually explicit (she notes that the Marquis de Sade now seems, by contrast, a writer for children). The earlier pieces provide some nasty fun (Ugresic compares Ivana Trump’s Jolie-esque lips to “fresh hot dogs”), and she imagines how today’s less-than-literate editors might reject book proposals for classic titles—e.g., Madame Bovary (“And forget the suicide at the end! No one would believe that”). Near the close, the essays acquire more gravity. She reminds us more than once how the Serbs destroyed the National Library in Sarajevo and how despots use books both to preach their gospel and crush their opponents. There is a powerful piece about exile and its many meanings (and consequences), and Ugresic concludes with the best essay of all about a carpenter named Roy who helped remodel her Amsterdam apartment and who had also begun writing a novel called The Seventh Screw.
Sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet, always intelligent and graceful.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2003
ISBN: 1-56478-298-0
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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