The Chaucer revealed by the last few decades of critical scholarship is much in need of a good popular biography; the cosy trivialities of Marchette Chute's 1946 Geoffrey Chaucer of England have little to do with the joyous solempnitee and vast sophistication we now discern in the works. No one could be more pleasantly qualified for the task than Gardner: poet, novelist, and veteran Middle English scholar and translator. This spirited book (a companion to Gardner's more specialized The Poetry of Chaucer, p. 28) scrubs away some of the more fatuous cliches surrounding our sanest poet. Gardner painstakingly sets the skilled civil servant's professional record against the fortunes of his royal masters and the course of the French and Spanish wars. For England the last decades of the 14th century were an age of glory, rapine, bankruptcy, extortion, and increasingly murderous debate over the limits of royal and parliamentary power. For the London vintner's son, they were a time of ceaseless, sometimes perilous achievement: he was at various times diplomatic negotiator, controller of the important wool customs, knight of the shire for Kent, justice of the peace in the same county, and chief clerk of the king's works with responsibility for overseeing construction and maintenance of various royal buildings. Gardner steers through this crowded career with polish and enthusiasm. But his attempts to fit the poetry into his biographical scheme are often highhanded. It is a pity that he does not explain more about his grapplings with dating problems and other textual matters, for his account of Chaucer's poetic development contains a lot of personal leaps in the dark (e.g., the blithe claim that the Physician's Tale is a late and very sophisticated work) that are not identified as such for the lay reader. Part of the difficulty is Gardner's avowed pursuit of something between "academic history" and "poetic celebration of things unchangeable." The deathbed scene he cooks up for Chaucer is as silly as any 19th-century explanation of the poet's celebrated and baffling Retraction. Against such interpretive oddities one must weigh the sheer joye and lustihede of Gardner's approach and the intellectual unity which he does by hook or by crook manage to impose on the life and the works. Forcefully written, provocative, and filled with a likable spirit of freewheeling evangelism.
Pub Date: April 1, 1977
ISBN: 1435107373
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1977
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
IN THE NEWS
© 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.
