A brilliant personal view of why we read and why we should.
In his first book (I May Be Some Time, 1997), journalist Spufford won acclaim for examining the English imagination; now he illuminates his own with verve and intimacy.
To call the author bookish is to call a python a mere reptile. Spufford admits to being simultaneously obsessed, enslaved, and enraptured by the idea of fiction from the time he apprehended his first story from a picture book spread out on a nearby adult lap. And while his writing has every bit as much conviction as flair, the reader needn’t take Spufford’s word alone on the power of books over young minds; he marshals Bettelheim, Piaget, and other child-development pioneers for support. His point: the story is the most efficient form in which to package the essential cognitive material we all need in order to confront life. For example, a 1970s study cited found that about 70 percent of two-year-olds could distinguish storytelling conventions from other forms of adult speech. How the process worked and continues to work with Spufford himself is the main theme here, however, and it’s anatomized with wit and incisiveness. Reflecting years later on Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, for instance, he sees the ending (Max returns from the imagined jungle to find the supper he was denied as punishment waiting in his bedroom, “and it was still hot”) as unsatisfying since it “took away the risk from it all.” Arriving at age 13 vaguely aware that he should begin reading more adult material, Spufford amusingly recounts his disappointment with classic English novels and the gnawing desperation of his search for a personal genre until he discovered science fiction in the nick of time. Later experiments with print porn didn’t bear much fruit, but Kerouac and the Beats satisfyingly stoked his “anarchist days” at university.
A brilliant personal view of why we read and why we should.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-7215-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
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
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