Assorted insights and opinions dom assorted book reviews, essays, interviews including a new preface to The Golden Notebook which redefines Doris Lessing's best known book from several facets (which she claims eluded most critics) and not necessarily as a pro-feminist statement (even if Anna did say — did she not — that the real revolution of our time is that of "women against men"). We know the various positions Lessing has taken and they are of course asserted here — whether on the disintegration of society and perhaps worse to come (which will make Women's Lib only seem "quaint" at some future time); on education (she left school at fourteen and benefited from her own ability to read or discard what she wanted); on madness or breakdown as she interpreted it, before Laing, as a form of self-healing; on the falling away of life in general and the small-mindedness of the systems imposed on it; etc. etc. etc. There is a touching piece on "My Father" who ended up "a thin shabby fly-away figure under the stars" and the reviews are variously on Malcolm X and Idries Shah and Sufism, Vonnegut and the little known Eugene Marais, Isak Dinesen and Olive Schreiner whose Story of an African Farm (1885) was recently reprinted. Necessarily in this form, or rather these forms, a certain repetitiousness is invited; inconsistency is also not hard to find; but all of that is incidental to what is really important for and about Doris Lessing. The title essay is where you will find her at her strongest — contending that the realistic novel, particularly of the 19th century, is the "highest form of prose writing" and that the novel should entail warmth, compassion, a love of people (as against Camus, Sartre, Genet, Beckett and their "acceptance of disgust" which betrays it) and make "a statement of faith in man himself." All in all, both controversially and reconcilably, a stimulus, an illumination, a pleasure.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1974
ISBN: 0006547591
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1974
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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