Several of Paterson's Washington Post Book World reviews, articles from The Writer, her award acceptance speeches, and some original chapters on her own writing and her thoughts on writing for young people—collected here, she says, for her adult readers, "not all [of them] librarians or teachers," just people who "have learned. . . truly how to read." Whoever these adults might be, they may well be interested in her revelation that she was a "weird little kid" (more accurately, a timid, uncertain outsider) and now writes for other weird little kids, and in her account of how she conceived and planned and progressed with some of her stories. (The Master Puppeteer began with a vivid dream.) However, readers seeking an award-winner's insights into the special nature of children's literature will find, as Paterson's title might indicate, only the usual solemn banalities: Children's literature is true art, not moral instruction; a sense of wonder is the greatest gift we can give our children; words are very precious; we must help non-readers to recognize that books are "friends who will enrich and broaden and give joy to their lives"; and we must give our children not slogans and platitudes (these apparently she reserves for adults), but "the life and growth and refreshment that only the full richness of our language can give." As for adult literature, "Fiction allows us to enter fully into the lives of other human beings"; "a season with Natasha and AndrÉ and Pierre may make us wiser and more compassionate people" (a dubious proposition); and, à propos of Agatha Christie, "we care desperately" who killed Roger Ackroyd. As for her own, "I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities. . . but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope. . . ." (Besides hope, she lists plot, brevity, absence of "symphonic" complexity, and characters readers can care for as requirements setting "boundaries"—not limits—on juvenile fiction.) No doubt the separate items gathered here well served their original occasions. Reading them in one lump tends to clot one's consciousness.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1981
ISBN: 0140362258
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Elsevier/Nelson
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1981
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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