The highly regarded novelist (Grendel; Jason and Medeia) is also a Middle English scholar of long standing; his biographical companion to the present volume will appear this spring. The Poetry of Chaucer, intended for a scholarly audience, attempts an ambitious and eclectic critical survey of the Chaucerian oeuvre. Like most recent interpreters, Gardner combines elements of the school which stresses Chaucer's subtle manipulation of his first-person narrators and the rival school which insists on the expressly doctrinal purposes of all medieval Christian art. In addition, Gardner convincingly argues that the 14th-century "nominalist" controversies underlie the structure of the Canterbury Tales and the House of Fame; tries to show the medieval psychology of the tripartite soul at work in character and motivation; reinterprets a great part of the Canterbury Tales in the light of contemporary anxiety over the limits of royal authority. Yet all of these excellent purposes are continually hampered by factual vagueness (as when Gardner suggests that the nominalist thinker Occam preceded Roger Bacon) and by a tendency to break down into a mass of unselective detail. For example, the attempt to link the three books of the House of Fame with the three branches of the trivium requires so many minor jugglings and qualifications that all sense of narrative proportion and continuity is lost. Unselective pun-huntings and Bible-ransackings abound, and one continually thinks of forests and trees. Does John in the Miller's Tale really have to be named after the author of the Apocalypse? Should the less polished part of the Canterbury Tales be redeemed as "intentionally bad art" or unappreciated masterpieces of irony? Quite possibly—but Gardner presents the case with very little sense of alternatives. He is a critic of important perceptions—"In his best works, Chaucer makes the play of artifice against natural voice not simply a poetic technique but a dialectic method, a means of perceiving." Yet his broader insights are dissipated when he attempts to apply them closely. For all his obvious love and learning, Gardner has failed to make his own words, as Chaucer made his, "cousin to the deed.
Pub Date: March 1, 1977
ISBN: 0809308711
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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