Sontag has made what seem to be rather conservative—and perhaps revisionist—choices in this sampler of Barthes' work, stressing complete short essays (presumably in the interest of wholeness) over sections of Barthes' longer and more radical works (Writing Degree Zero, S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, Camera Lucida). Not that she glosses over basic Barthes, for her introductory essay presents the ideas clearly. "Barthes is always after another meaning, a more eccentric—often utopian—discourse." She notes, too, his "aphorist's ability to conjure up a vivacious duality: anything could be split either into itself and its opposite, or into two versions of itself; and one term then fielded itself against the other to yield an unexpected relation." In this connection, Sontag updates her early interest in "camp" to encompass Barthes' more complex aesthete's penchant for liking more than he actually does, for seeming to be emptier and less personal than he really is. This is shrewd analysis, but the Barthes that Sontag thus gives us somehow comes off as slightly flitty; he is hardly the man who—with his insistence on writing as a "closed" or "hardened" system of language, not as communication—has perhaps done more than anyone else to elevate the critic to prima donna status (while suctioning out the flesh of literature). As if Sontag herself suspects this, she stresses Barthes' late stirrings of misgivings (what she calls his "taking pleasure, expressing love" for the world, as opposed to only system). And she makes much of one of the two heretofore unpublished pieces collected here: Barthes' address to the College de France upon his election to its faculty—in which he definitely does seem to be backtracking, putting emphasis on "literature" rather than on text. . .and nearly apologizing for semiology ("a kind of wheelchair, the wild card of contemporary knowledge"). The signals, then, are decidedly mixed here—Sontag's even more than Barthes'—but all the brilliance and outlandishness (and maybe even the self-destructiveness) of the Barthesian theory is well represented in this compendium.
Pub Date: Aug. 6, 1982
ISBN: 0099224917
Page Count: 495
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1982
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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