A prolific author’s animated ruminations on the risks and rewards of writing. Busch (Closing Arguments, 1991, etc.) is the author of 21 books of primarily fiction. Writing is his calling; he has no choice but to engage in what he sadly observes is a self-indulgent and often ruinous career. But the very fact that “it costs too much to write,” Busch argues, forces the author to a higher plane of his craft. As he illustrates in these essays on his own career and those of others, salvation from this dangerous profession lies in surrendering one’s passions to developing fictional characters and to pleasing someone other than oneself—the reader. The 16 essays offered here originally appeared primarily in literary or book reviews. They are divided into two parts; one devoted to essays that stem from Busch’s writing life, the other to the writings of others. Busch writes about his personal experience as a writer at various stages of his career, about writers, friends, and family who have influenced his work. The opening essay, “My Father’s War,” reveals memoir-writing at its best and demonstrates, not in argument, but in style what Busch is getting at in these essays. While unified by Busch’s passionate approach, this eclectic collection ranges from reflections on the author’s Brooklyn-based boyhood and early career in New York to a hilarious but serious diatribe on things “bad.” Among the “bad” are the postmodern critics who “do not love anything except the control they exercise in alleging the artist’s uncontrol.” Busch’s essays on other writers include the famous (Melville, Hemingway, and Dickens) and the underappreciated (Leslie Epstein, John O’Hara, and Terrence des Pres). By conveying with passion and insight why a literary work moves him, he excites the reader to read or reread books that have long gone stale in our imaginations. Writing and reading are reunited by an author who, in these essays, shows himself to be a sharp reader, too.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19255-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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