As with many volumes of selected letters, this one is studded with interesting material but patchy overall.
Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) scholar Anderson (River Boy: The Story of Mark Twain, 2003, etc.) presents a collection of her heretofore unpublished personal and business letters.
This collection is by no means exhaustive, and in his introduction, editor Anderson laments that many of Wilder’s letters were lost. Still, the letters written to her daughter Rose Wilder Lane during the production of the Little House series open a window into the author’s writing process and her apparent collaboration with her daughter on the series. The anthology is often uneven, especially the first few chapters, in which many of the letters are edited in a manner that leaves their contents unclear and others are short postcards that convey no relevant information. Anderson provides some brief context, but only readers intensely interested in the minutiae of Wilder’s life—for instance, what kind of melons she sent to her husband—will find these engaging. Anderson warns that passages that “contain redundant information” will be replaced throughout the book with either ellipses or italicized summaries of the contents, but in these early chapters, the ellipses are ubiquitous, and it is rarely clear what redundancies have been edited. Eventually, though, the collection becomes delightful as Wilder begins work on her famous book series. Letters sent to her daughter, editor, agent, and fans all demonstrate intriguing aspects of her childhood, home life, and writing process. It’s unfortunate that the collection contains so few of the letters written to Wilder by others. One of the pleasures of reading correspondence is the feeling of intimacy conferred by seeing a relationship unfold. With only one side of the many relationships portrayed here, some of that intimacy is lost.
As with many volumes of selected letters, this one is studded with interesting material but patchy overall.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241968-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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