Intelligent, savvy, and stylish literary journalism.
A master of the craft offers up sprightly and fervent essays.
Malcolm’s latest collection is a follow-up to Forty-One False Starts (2013), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. These 18 pieces, most previously published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books over the past 10 years, explore a pleasingly wide range of subjects. The first section consists of profiles. In the admiring titular piece, the author examines fashion designer Eileen Fisher, whose clothes “look as if they were heedlessly flung on rather than anxiously selected.” Malcolm herself became part of Fisher’s “kind of cult of the interestingly plain.” A photo of the pianist Yuja Wang, an “existential prodigy,” graces the cover of the book and is the subject of “Performance Artist.” Malcolm seems as much impressed with the “characteristically outré,” extremely short and tight dresses Wang wears when performing, accompanied by a pair of “sadistic high heels,” as she is with Wang’s musical brilliance. Things quiet down in “Three Sisters,” about New York City’s Argosy Bookshop and the accomplished women who run it. Then there’s the “current sweetheart of liberal cable TV,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow; the author calls Maddow’s show “TV entertainment at its finest.” The second section has cultural takes, most with a political edge. Malcolm is struck by the “atmosphere of a cold war propaganda film” in the cable TV docuseries Sarah Palin’s Alaska. The author’s incisive article sorting out the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings’ hijinks is especially timely and scathing, while “Pandora’s Click” examines “email’s evil,” more “like a dangerous power tool” than “harmless kitchen appliance.” The last section covers literature and book reviews: Tolstoy, Constance Garnett’s translations (which Malcolm loves), the Bloomsbury Group, Ted Hughes, and a resuscitating assessment of Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Making It. Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels are a “literary confection of…gossamer deliciousness.”
Intelligent, savvy, and stylish literary journalism.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27949-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
IN THE NEWS
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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