A valuable resource for students of Hurston’s work, and a mine for future research.
Revealing selection of letters by the renowned folklorist, novelist, and essayist, capably edited by Kaplan (English/USC).
Hurston (1891–1960) was one of the most prominent African-American writers of the 1920s and ’30s, a confidante and peer of Langston Hughes, Ruth Benedict, Carl Van Vechten, Franz Boas, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and other important intellectuals of the time. Her star fell in the ’50s, and she died in obscurity in a Florida welfare home. Rediscovered in the 1980s, her work, especially the memoir Dust Tracks on the Road (1942) and the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1936), is now a fixture in college courses on African-American literature, women’s studies, and folklore. Her letters add depth to Hurston’s self-portraits elsewhere, revealing her to be a complex, sometimes unpleasant figure. Of particular interest to literary scholars are: Hurston’s relationship with wealthy patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, who apparently expected a kind of fawning devotion in return for her largesse (the writer addresses her throughout as “darling godmother”); her sometimes prickly interactions with the artists of the Harlem Renaissance; and the rightward drift of her political beliefs, which, Kaplan allows, “have often baffled her admirers.” General readers may find Hurston’s broad entrepreneurial streak more compelling: at points, for instance, she importunes Langston Hughes to invest in property near her Florida home (“I can, if I choose sell to any of my friends so long as they belong to my social caste. They want no niggers in that neighborhood . . . [but] were agreeably surprised in me”) and seeks funds from Mason to develop a catering business (“I’d like you for my first client, and if I please you then I’ll write personal letters to some of the finer hostesses and try to establish myself as New York’s Chicken Specialist”).
A valuable resource for students of Hurston’s work, and a mine for future research.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-49035-6
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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