Ball has shaped these raw, revealing "journals" — gleaned from a dozen sources, including pocket notebooks and a large 1954 desk calendar bearing Ginsberg's random jottings — into the essential record of the questing, wild-eyed, lustful young poet's sexual, spiritual, and literary odyssey. The entries embrace the period from Ginsberg's early San Francisco days to the bittersweet arrival of the Beat Movement as a media curiosity. As early as the summer of 1954, when he was still lusting after Neal Cassady and before his romance with Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg had "recognitions...crucial to the writing of Howl." These writings and poetic ramblings are peppered with "Howl"-like phrasings: "drunken naked apartments"; "bursts of tropic artichoke energy." He records his dreams, usually frank and frustrated sexual encounters, in detail. He also confesses real sexual episodes with Cassady, Orlovsky, women. Of more interest, perhaps, are his ruminations on poetry and process, his copious reading lists, his comments on friends such as William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, and others. He marks the day in October 1955 when he debuted "Howl, Part 1" at the Six Gallery as the day when "the San Francisco Renaissance and a new American poetry were born." His early West Coast days and his sojourns to Mexico and Morocco have received ample attention. But manifest in his 1957-58 ramblings through Paris, Venice, and London is his profound sense of alienation, his cultivation of the notion of poet-as-expatriate, so evident in his work. On his return to the US and the media circus stirred up by Kerouac, he notes that his journal writing has "become too unspontaneous" and resolves to focus more on writing "loose poems," which fill hundreds of pages. "Only poetry," he notes, "will save America." Ball has illuminated and brought cohesion to the fragmented and often hallucinatory ruminations and ravings of a mad, genius poet. An important document has been added to the Beat canon.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0140239545
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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
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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