Bayley is England’s Edmund Wilson, and reading him on reading others truly is an education.
A generous display of the indefatigable British critic’s wares: nearly 70 informed, eloquent, and endlessly stimulating book reviews and literary essays.
They’re grouped mostly by genre and nationality—and there are few fields of interest about which this ineffably generous uncommon reader doesn’t have something interesting to say. Rummaging through “English Literature,” he celebrates the productively “divided natures” of Dickens and Hardy, Trollope’s mastery of the quotidian, and the achievements of those “self-created” geniuses George Orwell and T.E. Lawrence. Perusing “The English Poets,” he notes Keats’s appropriation of “the Shakespearean spirit,” and gives overdue homage to Tennyson in a penetrating assessment keenly sensitive to the poet’s ingenuous impetuosity and very real greatness. “Mother Russia” gathers knowledgeable appreciations of Pushkin’s profound influence on the 19th-century novel, the unjustly neglected Ivan Bunin (whose “descriptive prose is alive in the same absolute sense as that of D.H. Lawrence”), and those indigenous, ultimately un-translatable great poets Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. Bayley seems less astute on “American Poetry,” though he responds strongly to Whitman’s infectious ebullience, and memorably pinpoints the elusive John Ashbery’s poetic method as “romantic alchemy.” Few could match his comprehension of 20th-century writing “Out of Eastern Europe”—or have developed the rich variations he works on the observation that “so many European poets, who . . . [endured] the Second World War, have written in consequence a poetry of extreme simplicity and precision”—in revelatory analyses of Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert, and Czeslaw Milosz. Further brief pieces praise Stendhal’s salutary egoism, Angela Carter’s inventive feminism, the intellectual symbiosis shared by Henry and William James, and intellectual combat that kept Leo and Sophia Tolstoy together (and apart), and, in a fine ending essay, Gore Vidal’s brilliant memoir Palimpsest.
Bayley is England’s Edmund Wilson, and reading him on reading others truly is an education.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05840-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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