A slim volume that roams across continents, genres, and centuries to convey that which is so difficult to express.
An allusive and elusive collection of meditations on being and becoming, rites of passage, boys and the men they become.
In her acknowledgements, Howe (Second Childhood, 2014, etc.), best known for her poetry, writes that these prose pieces and poems initially were published in a variety of places and that some were presented at conferences. The way they are organized, they seem to cohere as a whole, though readers’ challenge is to find similar meanings in the films the author loves and frequently references. “I have learned only recently that films are very similar to hallucinations, which are physiologically the same as experience,” she writes. In reference to a director whose influences are clear and a saint for whom she offers something of an alternative biography, Howe writes, “Rossellini’s ethic in filmmaking was Franciscan: to use little money, shoot spontaneously, and edit not much. Like the ‘first word, best word’ school of poetry, Rossellini mistrusted the process of refinement and treated his films as some might treat their notebooks, or first drafts.” There is very much a cinematic quality to the way these pieces connect and convey their meaning, and there’s also a sense that these might be notes toward something more immediately coherent. When the author writes of the “forever potential” of the child who resists yet can’t “stop its evolution into a grownup,” readers are invited to connect this with her provocative illumination of a poet’s soul of the surviving Tsarnaev brother and his reflections before the Boston Marathon bombing—and then to connect that with the life of a young rebel who would become a saint: “Francis was an idealistic teenager, an iconic candidate for today’s teenage gangs and jihads.”
A slim volume that roams across continents, genres, and centuries to convey that which is so difficult to express.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55597-756-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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