A minor but charming addendum to 20th-century literary history.
Poet Field (Counting Myself Lucky, 1992, etc.) atmospherically depicts gay and avant-garde life in the decades following WWII.
His generation of bohemians, the author claims, were the last to reject any kind of fame or commercial success as “selling out.” They clung to poverty and artistic purity as they bounced from Greenwich Village to the Left Bank in Paris to Morocco, but their proudly unconventional odysseys too often ended in mental illness and premature death. The better-known names here—Frank O’Hara, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, May Swenson—achieved varying degrees of mainstream renown; Field’s closest friends were more marginal figures. Typical in his self-destructive but oddly admirable eccentricity was critic and novelist Alfred Chester (the would-be Sontag spouse of the title), who had a brief moment of minor celebrity in the New York literary scene of the early 1960s before he descended into alcoholism and madness. Chester’s decline was sparked in part by the malevolent impact of time spent in Tangiers under the influence of Paul Bowles, one of the few people who gets a predominantly negative assessment from the author, who depicts Bowles as a self-protective vampire sucking his inspiration from the reckless acting out of both his wife Jane and Chester. In general, Field is gossipy and mildly bitchy but basically good-hearted as he profiles such now-forgotten figures as Gurdjieff disciple Fritz Peters, painter/friend-to-cannibals Tobias Schneebaum and poets Dunstan Thompson, Robert Friend and Ralph Pomeroy. He offers plenty of eye-openingly frank accounts of gay sex (penis size, orifice preference, etc.) and dish on who slept with whom. But Field also writes eloquently about his efforts to make his poetry more conversational and less literary, affectionately about settling down with lifelong partner Neil Derrick and shrewdly about the politics of literary bohemia. A touching final chapter about friends in the present-day Village reminds us that rebels get old too.
A minor but charming addendum to 20th-century literary history.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-299-21320-X
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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