For the die-hard fan.
Frothy, courtly occasional pieces from Booker-winning Atwood (The Blind Assassin, 2000, etc.).
The Toronto-based novelist is a powerful booster of her fellow Canadian literati, whom Americans tend to lose in translation. Here, she showcases some of the reviews and comments published over the last two decades regarding important Canadian fiction—from Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God, Lucy M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi to the lifetime achievements of Mordecai Richler and Carol Shields. Atwood scrutinizes them all. Other pieces describe writing her dystopian masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, while living in west Berlin and banging “on a rented typewriter with a German keyboard,” and her fascination with the ill-fated 1845 Franklin Expedition, whose crew perished of lead poisoning while seeking the Northwest Passage to the Orient. (She made a “literary pilgrimage” to Beechy Island to revisit the expedition’s remains.) The reviews are less interesting, since Atwood writes only about books that she likes and admits to being a “stroker” (who rewards good performance) rather than a “spanker” (who punishes bad performance). A few autobiographical essays evoke her more prickly feminist side and will arrest the attention of her devout readers: “That Certain Thing Called the Girlfriend” proclaims women to be at least as interested in other women as in men, and “Laughter vs. Death,” sparked by research she did for Bodily Harm, offers her appalled reflections on the pornography industry. In a playful review of Robin Robertson’s Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame, Atwood records her answer when a Mexican TV interviewer asked whether she considered herself feminine: “What, at my age?” she blurted out. She also weighs in on Gabriel García Márquez, Antonia Fraser, Marina Warner, Angela Carter, H.G. Wells, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Atwood is always a gracious writer, stately and polished, though the public persona exemplified here is not nearly as fascinating as her darkly enigmatic literary side.
For the die-hard fan.Pub Date: April 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1535-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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