A Nobel Prize winner illuminates topics ranging from death and great writers to religion and myth, ethnicity and creativity, and much more. Canetti's (190594) prestige rests on an unusual assortment of books, from his one novel, Auto-da-FÇ, to the wide-ranging study of social anthropology, Crowds and Power, to a three-volume memoir published in the '70s. The language of Canetti's writing is German, reflecting his formative years in Vienna, but his background was multilingual and multinational; he spent his final decades in England—hence the title of this volume. Recent books from Canetti's pen (such as Agony of Flies, 1994) have been of the notebook genre, of which he was a master. Some might greet the new book as the last gasp of an old writer emptying scraps of paper from his desk drawers. But in fact these ``notes,'' which range from opaque jottings to incisively perceptive aphorisms, will strike the experienced reader of Canetti as a fine display of cerebral fireworks. Language and writing were the mode of his thought process. He did not put his thoughts into words; his thoughts were themselves a meteor shower of vivid words and phrases, sentences that seem to flash whole from his extraordinary mind. ``A great many ideas,'' as he puts it, ``want to remain comets.'' The comment embodies Canetti's enthusiasm for the fragment as form. Reading this volume could be likened to touring the workshop of a master sculptor. No piece is finished: Some seem abandoned, some seem in progress, some are scarcely recognizable, yet each exists for its own sake, and each bears the distinctive marks of the master's chisel. Canetti's touch is uncompromising in its authority, its unpretentious honesty, and its passion. This volume is composed as a gathering of fragments and as such will not please many. But the few will be grateful for Canetti's book and for Hargraves's exacting translation of it.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-22326-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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