Well-wrought work strongly seasoned with polemic.
A skilled fiction-writer and essayist trains his eye on contemporary writers.
Mallon (Civil War novel Two Moons, 1999, etc.) writes for publications ranging from GQ to the Yale Review, and these pieces show a similar breadth: whether sizing up Nicholson Baker (whose strength, he writes, lies in depicting the small in epic proportions) or describing Don DeLillo as the first author to write a post–Cold War novel (Underworld, 1997), Mallon always follows the E.B. White school of prose: everything is clear and concise and definitive. Each essay is a model for those who aspire to the form, but the author uses his clarity to sharp ends: Mallon has literary bones to pick, especially with memoirists whom he views as more concerned with their own feelings and interior lives than the world around them. Twice Mallon writes that he’d “rather end the day having had one clear thought than one strong feeling” and, by the way he judges writers, the reader believes him. His love for thought, at the expense of feeling, is allied to his love for hard facts and historical fiction (he has written five historical novels). Sometimes this stance is right on target: his review of David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars (“Snow Falling on Readers”) blasts its sentimentality, moving anyone who enjoyed the story to shame. When attacking Will Self’s novels for failing to realize their own potential, however, one feels the specter of rigidity rearing its ugly head. And when he (partially) praises Edmund Morris’s biography of Ronald Reagan, Dutch, Mallon reveals that sometimes fact can be circumvented when it involves some of his favorite themes. But these, after all, are Mallon’s essays and, while sometimes they show cracks, they are fundamentally solid.
Well-wrought work strongly seasoned with polemic.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40916-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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
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
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