Eclectic, exuberant fandom from Chabon.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author goes his own way writing about some of his favorite books and comics.
Chabon (Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, 2018, etc.) eagerly returns to the beloved genres of his youth in this joyous collection covering nearly 20 years of introductions, prefaces, forewords, and afterwords to adventure tales, sci-fi, ghost stories, comic books, and his own books, all written in the “hope of bringing pleasure to the reader—to some reader, somewhere.” He confesses he read Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth at least five or six times. Though it didn’t make him want to be a writer—that came later with Arthur Conan Doyle—Juster’s “world of wonders” still gives him a “tiny thrill of nostalgia and affection for the wonderful book.” Stop “reading this nonsense,” he chides, and go read the book. That advice reflects a common theme in this collection: Chabon, the fan, urging readers to read these stories. He firmly believes M.R. James’ ghost story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” is one of the “finest short stories ever written.” He confesses that the “splendor and fragility” of Ray Bradbury’s story “The Rocket Man,” which Chabon first read when he was 10, was the “most important short story in my life as a writer.” Bradbury “gave me my first everlasting lessons in literary style.” Chabon waxes euphoric about the “remarkable artistic achievement” of Michael Moorcock’s heroic fantasy, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, as he does about Howard Chaykin, the “craftsman, an artisan of pop,” and his experiments in comic book art. There are two pieces about Chabon’s abandoned, early “disaster,” Fountain City, one on Summerland, and one on The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and discovering his need to write in “traditional, bourgeois narrative form.” The author closes with a couple liner notes about Mark Ronson and the Pittsburgh “post-punk” band Carsickness.
Eclectic, exuberant fandom from Chabon.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285129-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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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