A first-rate collection from a first-rate writer.
An eclectic and engaging selection of recent pieces, mostly about other writers, from the award-winning novelist (The March, 2005, etc.).
Doctorow’s playful title (it alludes to those who create, not those who believe we were created) masks a serious purpose—to examine the mystery and the magic of human creation. Although he focuses principally on novelists and playwrights, he includes a very strong piece about Einstein, whose creativity, Doctorow argues, though astonishing, was nonetheless similar to the acts of novelists and artists and creative thinkers of all sorts. These essays form an impressive collection, in one sense, because they are so different from one another. They all deal with “creationists,” but they originally appeared as speeches, forewords or afterwords to other books, remarks at symposia, essays in literary or political journals. As a result, although each bears Doctorow’s signature intelligence and lyricism, each has a singularity, as well; these are not cookie-cutter pieces lifted from the same piece of rolled dough. Doctorow has no peer in his powerful use of imagery. In his wonderful piece on Melville, he offers the picture of Moby-Dick swallowing not just the Pequod but the entire English language. He notes that Hemingway found the “most romantic face” of “our great operative myth of rugged individualism.” He blasts Margaret Thatcher and George Bush; he writes hymns to Arthur Miller and John Dos Passos and Harpo Marx. The range of these pieces reveals Doctorow’s wide reading and capacious mind: He takes on the book of Genesis, plus Malraux, Poe (whose poetry Doctorow disdains), Twain, Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Kafka, W.G. Sebald and others. Also present are some keen-edged political and social commentary. “Why write when you could be shooting someone?” he asks at the outset. And his final piece (about thermonuclear bombs) notes that World War II brought an end to the quaint distinction between combatants and noncombatants. The bomb is an equal-opportunity destroyer.
A first-rate collection from a first-rate writer.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6495-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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