Some time ago in The New York Review, Robert Mazzocco wrote that "if it is true Graves won't suffer fools gladly, it is even truer he suffers his betters not at all. His betters represent modernism, a bete noire." Naturally, Graves comes down hardest on his competitors, and in that notoriously cranky lecture, "These Be Your Gods, O Israel!" delivered at Oxford during the mid-Fifties, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Auden, and Dylan Thomas are "unmasked." They represent, for Graves, fashionable poseurs who have never bothered "about the sense" of anything they wrote. Here he is scuttling Thomas: "I do not mean that he aimed deliberately off-target, as the later Yeats did. Thomas seems to have decided that there was no need to aim at all, so long as the explosion sounded loud enough." Graves' wit has always been chilly, but the elegance and forked gaiety which accompanies it in the poetry and which is so suitable to the patrician romanticist he is, has an off-putting effect in his essays. Discussing literary topics or techniques (the genesis of the word "baraka," for instance, or the "misdirections" of Keats, the "incoherences" of Blake: "Angels were thick on Blake's staircase: some divinely eloquent, some mouthing nonsense"), Graves usually gives the impression of speaking ex cathedra. Often you can cut the pedantry with a knife, and the opinions offered, when not consciously startling, rest on rationalist touchstones (the force inspiring poets is "love, controlled by reason") which are natty platitudes. Still, this is largely a fault of style or tone: beneath the magisterial bitchiness lies a very real attachment to art and craft.
Pub Date: July 25, 1969
ISBN: 0385018703
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1969
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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