With one uncharacteristically personal and moving exception, Gordimer (None to Accompany Me, 1994, etc.) offers crisp and richly allusive explorations of the tensions between a writer's art and the realities of life in six essays first delivered as the 1994 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. The first essay, ``Adam's Rib: Fictions and Realities,'' in which she responds to the charge that a writer's characters are based on real people, provides an overview of the ideas she subsequently explores. For her, writing is like ``Primo Levi's metamir, in which a metaphysical mirror does not obey the law of optics but reproduces your image as it is seen by the person who stands before you.'' The writer is such a person and receives intimations, usually hidden, of what you areintimations that become fiction, in which the writer is neither a looter of characters nor an absentee presence dependent on the reader as ``producer of the text.'' Her second essay, ``Hanging on a Sunrise: Testimony and the Imagination in Revolutionary Writings,'' discusses the state of writing in postapartheid South Africa, as members of the ANC publish their memoirs, the best of which possess a ``spirit beyond and above setting the story straight, which is the business and usefulness of testimony.'' Essays such as ``Zaabalawi: The Concealed Side,'' ``To Hold the Yam and the Knife,'' and ``Forgotten Promised Land'' respectively explore the writer's quest ``for the Home that is the truth, undefined by walls, by borders, by regimes'' in Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy, Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah; and Amos Oz's Fima. And in ``That Other World that was the World,'' Gordimer explains how she, the child of immigrants, came to write, and how after years of alienation under apartheid, she ``may now speak of `my people.' '' A well-argued brief for writers and writing to which Gordimer's South African experience adds a unique perspective.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-674-96232-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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