Readers interested in Kraus will be better served by Reitter’s The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning...
Two angry men rail against their culture.
Franzen (Farther Away: Essays, 2012, etc.) discovered Austrian essayist, playwright and poet Karl Kraus (1874–1936) when he studied in Berlin in 1981-1982. A prominent social critic in early-20th-century Vienna, Kraus had been long forgotten, but his work resonated with Franzen, who saw the sharp, bitter writer as a kindred spirit. Franzen calls Kraus a “farseeing prophet” who hated, above all, the media, which thrived on gossip and was antagonistic to the “kind of spirituality/imaginativeness that, as Kraus saw it, makes us human.” As a kind of homage, Franzen has translated four of Kraus’ essays for this bilingual, profusely annotated edition. He warns readers that Kraus is a difficult writer, and in translation, his work comes across as stilted and awkward. The essays themselves, however, may be less interesting to readers than the extensive annotations. Sometimes a few lines by Kraus, for example, are followed by several pages of notes: Franzen’s autobiographical ruminations and detailed, informative historical context by Ohio State professor Paul Reitter. Novelist Daniel Kehlmann, a friend of Franzen, also rings in with comments. Franzen’s personal reflections focus on his response to Kraus, his early ambitions and frustrations as a writer, his engagement to the woman he eventually married and the reasons he embraced “anger as a way of life” at the age of 22. Although he claims that he has outgrown his former rage, like Kraus, he is critical of much in his own culture: Apple products, Steve Jobs, French literary theory, Salman Rushdie’s tweets, 1,000-page biographies, the blogosphere, Amazon, John Updike, social media, Facebook and assaults to the natural environment.
Readers interested in Kraus will be better served by Reitter’s The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning (2008). This book is for Franzen’s fans.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0374182212
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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