Admittedly formulaic, but also learned, educative and even provocative.
A baker’s dozen of titles that have altered the course of history.
The 13 “winners” include the expected (Walden, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), the indisputable (The Federalist Papers, The Journals of Lewis and Clark), the pleasant surprise (Dr. Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care) and the capricious (How to Win Friends and Influence People). With this last, readers of The Art of Teaching (2005) will recognize another tribute to the influence of Dale Carnegie in Parini’s youth. Each chapter has the same structure: an introduction, some background on the writer and the book, a summary of the text (15 pages or so being too long for some of them) and a discussion of the work’s legacy. The Promised Land (1912), for example, spawned an entire genre of literature written about the immigrant experience, stretching into the present with Frank McCourt, Amy Tan and Sandra Cisneros. Parini (English and Creative Writing/Middlebury Coll.) is usually generous, although Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique takes some shots. (He finds it on occasion “cursory and reductive.”) The author also aims some pokes at the current Bush Administration, at minister Joel Osteen (“one of the shallowest of current hucksters”) and at Bill Clinton. Parini does not always work sufficiently hard to eliminate clichés; we read about a work’s “sheer impact”; we learn how Friedan, in college, “spread her wings.” Still, his analysis of the racial controversy about Huckleberry Finn is illuminating and wise; his discussion of Of Plymouth Plantation, invigorating. A point not much discussed: Will books ever again so greatly affect our ever-more-nonliterate society? Perhaps anticipating snarls of displeasure about omissions, the author offers a lightly annotated appendix, “One Hundred More Books That Changed America.”
Admittedly formulaic, but also learned, educative and even provocative.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52276-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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