History is nothing if not perverse. In the heart of Victorian England Edward Fitzgerald, an eccentric scholar, published his version of an unknown poem by a medieval Persian, Omar Khayaam. Fitzgerald's Rubaiyyat, with its mixture of fatalism and hedonistic joy, shocked his contemporaries and became famous throughout the English-speaking world. Now in our advanced jaded age, Robert Graves, drawing upon the "original" text, "an earlier and authenticated manuscript" found "in the possession of the family of Omar Ali-Shah, Sufi poet and classical Persian scholar," presents a work which would surely have been dear to the heart of every 19th century vicarage. Though hardly Christian, the new Rubaiyyat, jointly translated by Graves and Ali-Shah, now emerges as a mystic meditation without blasphemy, sexual irregularity, or carousing: "Khayaam treats wine in Sufic fashion as a metaphor of the ecstasy excited by divine love." In short, where Fitzgerald's Omar attempts to embrace "the sorry scheme of things" through exotic worldliness, the pious figure "resurrected" by the current translators is concerned with other matters: "Though dust of sin lies clotted on my brow/Yet will I not despair of mercy. When/Did Omar argue that the One was Two?" No doubt, historians will be arguing this turnabout for many moons. Purely as poetry, however, there can be no debate: Fitzgerald is the winner. True or not, his Rubaiyyat is solid gold.
Pub Date: May 17, 1968
ISBN: 0385032757
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1968
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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