Brinkley’s intelligent choices allow us to see both the familiar Kerouac and a mysterious stranger as well.
An eclectic sampling of the many facets of the legendary peripatetic writer, selected from assorted journals and notebooks Kerouac kept during the time he was working on his first two novels.
Editor Brinkley acknowledges that this is not for scholars: he has silently cut portions, rearranged others, eliminated the author’s doodles and marginalia, and supplied only a modest number of footnotes. Instead, this is an edition for temperate Kerouac fans (true fanatics must await a more scholarly treatment) and for those handful of folks who have never heard of On the Road. Still, the footnotes are not always complete (Brinkley’s comment about Hecuba, for example, neglects to mention that Kerouac is alluding to Hamlet in the passage); nor does the editor gloss every allusion (he neglects to tell us that a Randolph Scott film Kerouac refers to is probably Trail Street, 1947). Cavils aside, the volume has numerous virtues, the most significant of which is the much more capacious Kerouac it reveals. Readers who know him only as a “Beat Generation” writer will be surprised to see the depth of his religious struggles (included are some psalms Kerouac composed) and to learn of his devotion to his mother. Some readers may marvel that one of his favorite novelists was Anthony Trollope, that he loved Major League baseball (in some passages he compares his performance to a hitter’s), that he chided himself occasionally for not working out at the Y, that he revised repeatedly and tenaciously (no “automatic writer,” Kerouac). Readers will probably not be surprised to read his accounts of binge-drinking (he died of cirrhosis at 47), of his passions for Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Twain, of his obsessions for travel (back and forth across the country, time after time). In these journals appears some of that Whitmanesque energy and effluence and exuberance (and superfluity) for which his fiction is known.
Brinkley’s intelligent choices allow us to see both the familiar Kerouac and a mysterious stranger as well.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03341-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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