Parini is an accomplished novelist (Benjamin's Crossing, p. 410, etc.), poet, biographer, and critic, so it is no surprise that these essays roam all over the literary map. In fact, this volume feels like three shorter books cobbled together. The 20 pieces included here (some appearing for the first time), written over the past 25 years, are grouped in three categories: personal essays with an autobiographical bent; appreciations of other poets; essays on the embattled ground of literary theory. The result highlights Parini's strengths and weaknesses as a writer of nonfiction. The personal essays exhibit considerable charm, particularly when Parini is discussing the process of writing. Regrettably, there's a fair amount of repetition here; for example, we learn several times that Parini and his wife (also a writer) both take considerable pleasure in writing in restaurants and cafes, once in an essay on that habit, again in a piece on the year they spent in Italy, and yet again in a paean to small-town life. By contrast, the middle section is mercifully free of this problem. Unfortunately, with the exception of an excellent piece on Frost—one which helps make that icon of literature seem new once more—the rest of this section is stodgily written, fragrant with the aroma of footnotes left behind and about as compelling as an evening with someone's old graduate seminar papers. That said, it's a complete surprise, then, that Parini's writing on the current wars over theory are incisive and engaging. Drawing on his own experiences as poet, teacher, biographer, and novelist, he makes some nicely forthright judgments on the simultaneous need for and suspicion of theory. Steering a modest middle ground, he makes a sound case for the poststructuralists without being chained to their excesses. A book to be dipped into—at least in its first and last sections—rather than read through, but not without its felicities.
Pub Date: Feb. 19, 1998
ISBN: 0-231-11070-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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