The complete (174) Toronto Star pieces young Hemingway wrote after his return from WW I on his second job as a writer. At 18, before going to Italy for ambulance service, he'd spent six months as a cub on the Kansas City Star. During his four years (1920-24) as a Toronto free-lancer, Hemingway found himself steadily in print. Meanwhile, he was writing widely rejected short stories (overarch and stilted) and after a stretch in Toronto spent much of his time on the Continent, sending back dispatches. Hemingway the feature-writer burned with a hard flame that turned clichés to ash and left only a glowing, often mordant wit and a robust sense of language. Whatever other sources Hemingway's news style may have had, Ring Lardner is the most obvious—there are several laugh-out-loud heartfelt but deadpan parodies herein, especially of sports writing: "We were fishing for the rainbow trout where a little river comes into a lake and cuts a channel alongside the bank. Into the mouth of this river and the bay it empties into, big schools of rainbow trout come out of the big lake. They chase the shiners and young herring and you can see their back fins coming out of the water like porpoises with a shower of minnows shooting up into the air. Every once in a while a big trout will jump clear of the water with a noise like somebody throwing a bathtub into the lake." Whenever Hemingway touches on sports, especially fishing and camping, he exhales poetry. Often, however, both here and abroad, he feels the need to give his reader the "true facts" about some social condition or political figure, and we hear the first tones of the Papa of later years telling us how it truly was. Everything in Paris seems to bring him to bright attention, for example the Russian exiles selling their jewels, while waiting for something wonderful to happen back home. "There is a cafe on the Boulevard Montparnasse where a great number of Russians gather every day for this something wonderful to happen, and to recall the great old days of the Czar. But there is a great probability that nothing very wonderful nor unexpected will happen and then, eventually, like all the rest of the world, the Russians of Paris may have to go to work. It seems a pity, they are such a charming lot." As the dispatches gather, Hemingway becomes more densely knowledgable and one feels the very forests, small towns, train stops and wayside inns yielding copy to the stroke of his fingertips. And then, in one of his longest pieces, there is the explosion of carnival and the running of the bulls in Pamplona, where young Ernest, in writer's heaven, is sad and acidulous and giddy with action, color, girls, and the dangerous bulls—"they come out into the glare of the arena to die in the afternoon." Birth of a style heard round the world. Like early Tolstoy, the guy had something.
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1985
ISBN: 0684188023
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1985
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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