A must for children’s literature professionals and aficionados.
The celebrated children’s book author and illustrator reflects on writing and reading children’s literature from her long, unique perspective.
During her successful career, Babbitt (The Devil’s Storybooks, 2012, etc.), who died in 2016, earned a Newbery Honor Medal and the E.B. White Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. This compilation of 18 chronologically arranged speeches and articles spans the years between 1970 and 2004. During this time, she describes herself as a “little dog” barking with the “big dogs” of the adult literary world who routinely relegate children’s literature to a lesser status. Babbitt suggests that the “tangible difference” between adult and children’s literature resides in the latter’s “Happy Ending,” and she refutes the “widespread American belief that children are irrelevant.” Writing in 1973, she condemns American children’s novels as “patently artificial” and “sweet beyond bearing,” urging writers to reflect on what we have “in common with the rest of the world.” She visits and revisits the universal pattern of what Joseph Campbell called the “separation, adventure, and return” path common in children’s fantasy (including her own). A children’s story “doesn’t deny the dark; it simply reaffirms the light.” Wary of those who would use children’s fiction to teach social responsibility, Babbitt adamantly asserts that the purpose of reading stories is to give children pleasure. Aware of her own aging, she peppers her later essays with amusing autobiographical anecdotes, recalled vividly and fondly. Writing with passion and insight, the author’s voice remains direct, incisive, witty, and true as she draws widely from the canon of children’s and adult literature. While some of her observations may be dated, most remain relevant as she astutely holds fast to the importance of giving children honest, hopeful, and entertaining stories in a changing world.
A must for children’s literature professionals and aficionados.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-31040-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
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