Deeply intelligent, provocative, and enjoyable literary investigations.
A striking collection of 26 literary essays, many taken from The New York Review of Books, that amply display Coetzee’s freethinking erudition and go-your-own-way intellectual honesty.
In prose that is smooth as milk over the bottle’s lip, Coetzee (Disgrace, 2000, etc.) unleashes his take on a battery of writers ranging from Samuel Richardson and Daniel Dafoe to William Gass and Daphne Rooke. He chides Salman Rushdie for not knowing what he’s talking about (“with all respect due to the author, one must demure”), even when what he’s talking about is The Moor’s Last Sigh. He covers Joseph Brodsky’s critical poetics in a voice that is as vibrant as the Russian’s own, and he wittily observes that A.S. Byatt’s characters “in times of crisis . . . do not go into therapy.” There are quick, lambent biographies of Breyten Breytenbach, Noel Mostert, Alan Paton, and Helen Suzman, as well as one of Thomas Pringle, father of English-language poetry in South Africa (whom Coetzee garrotes, labeling his work “indifferent”). He cuts Cees Nooteboom for his lack of anguish over the expulsion of heartfelt imagination from the world, but he applauds fellow Dutchman Harry Mulisch’s sure handling of the “terrible fissure in European history opened by the Holocaust.” He lauds Amos Oz for that same sure hand, accompanied by a light touch, in his politically-charged novels set in the fluid margins of Israel. Coetzee allows his emotional sentiments to percolate through these critiques and tries to measure the same in his subjects, as in an essay on Nadine Gordimer reconnoitering the realm of the artist’s special calling, that “art tells a truth transcending the truth of history,” wherein the goal of writing can strive for the transformation of society.
Deeply intelligent, provocative, and enjoyable literary investigations.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89982-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
