The Goldstones (Lawrence: Rights, 1992; Nancy: Mommy and the Murder, 1995; etc.) offer a sprightly paced travelogue that records their education in literary connoisseurship. Their interest in rare books began innocently enough when they challenged themselves to limit spending on birthday gifts for each other. Nancy walked into a Lenox, Mass., bookstore in search of a hardcover copy of War and Peace and discovered instead the large, arcane world of out-of-print books. With the discovery in Boston, weeks later, of a $40 first-edition of B. Traven's novel The Night Visitor, they were hooked. At a book fair the Goldstones are stunned to encounter a $50,000 1914 first edition Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. ``Fifty thousand dollars for Tarzan? Could it be that somehow Tarzan was great literature and we didn't know it?'' Through visiting all the best stores, attending fairs and auctions, and perusing catalogues, the Goldstones learn to read the dealers' idiosyncrasies and the terminology of the trade, and gain a perspective on the idea that the business of rare books is, after all, a business: Demand drives prices, and (as with antiques and other collectibles) what has value is whatever collectors want. (Soon they plop down several hundreds for a two-volume first edition of Bleak House.) In the manner of good travel writing, the authors' descriptions are evocative, their storytelling compassionate—and frequently hilarious. (``How did you find us?'' complains a midtown Manhattan rare-book dealer when the Goldstones arrive on his doorstep. ``We control our advertising very carefully.'') And to their bedazzlement, they encounter some real gems, the ``one of a kind,'' the ``utterly and completely irreplaceable.'' In the end, the authors concede, there is satisfaction to be found in more mundane discoveries, too. A sort of Year in Provence for book lovers: an entertaining armchair introduction to an esoteric but captivating subject.
Pub Date: May 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15682-0
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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