Deft, graceful essays from a sharply incisive writer.
The award-winning fiction writer gathers essays written over the past three decades.
Reviewing Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Passionate Minds, Moore (English/Vanderbilt Univ.; Bark: Stories, 2014, etc.) offered generous praise for the collection of literary profiles: “with its unintimidated questions and explorations,” the book, she wrote, “is provocative and bracing, a wizard’s mix of innocence and fire.” Much the same can be said of these articles, reviews, bits of memoir, and commentaries, many published in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times. The collection opens with a review of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn which Moore wrote for Cornell’s literary magazine in 1983 and ends with an essay about blues guitarist Stephen Stills, whose concert Moore attended in “late-middle-aged ecstasy” in 2017. An astute, sympathetic reader, she appreciates the “friendly irony” of Bobbie Ann Mason’s stories; Don DeLillo’s “ability to let America, the bad dream of it, speak through his pen”; and Joyce Carol Oates’ “richly witty and despairing” Broke Heart Blues. Moore defends the controversial choice of Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven, a novel as linked stories, as a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award: Silber writes like “a graceful swimmer on a leisurely swim, though her brisk, radiant prose chops the water like a sprite.” Although most pieces focus on books, Moore rings in on a few TV shows, including The Wire, which she found riveting for its “admirable and unblinking look at a cursed people—America’s largely black and brown urban underclass”; and the “legitimately brilliant drama” of the NBC series Friday Night Lights. On politics, Moore can be unsparing in her disdain: in 1998, during the Starr investigation of the Lewinsky scandal, she wondered at the public’s apparently sudden shock and anger about a man who always seemed to her “a charming shark, a user, a yuppie, a bad actor, and a sexy, lying fool.” She skewers Trump as “part Crazy Eddie, part Henry VIII, part AWOL Andrew Jackson…in it for the adventure and applause.”
Deft, graceful essays from a sharply incisive writer.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3248-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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