Witty, dishy, trenchant reports by novelist and short-story writer Powell to an array of correspondents, ranging from a young grandniece to Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. This collection begins with a teenage Powell’s charming 1913 letter to her guardian/aunt, away on a trip, catching Aunt Orpha up on all the home doings, including Powell’s efforts to make a peach pie and her new duties as editor in chief of the high school paper (“I need the experience if I intend to pursue a journalistic career.”). It ends with a letter to her adult nephew and friend, written less than a month before her death, but still full of news of theater, literature, and the foibles of friends. Powell was born and grew up in the Midwest but moved to New York City and established herself in the Greenwich Village of the 1920s and “30s, eating, drinking, and partying with famous and not so famous writers, musicians, and artists, as well as their patrons, editors, and publishers. She was no hanger-on, but a prolific and sometime successful author of novels about the contemporary New York scene (including post-WWII), as well as stories set in the Midwest of her childhood; for a time, Max Perkins was her editor. Her output also included plays, film treatments, short stories, magazine articles, and this voluminous correspondence, only part of which has survived. Devoted to her husband (although it appears she had at least one passionate extramarital affair) and her autistic son, in these letters, Powell reveals only a portion of the pain she suffered in raising her child. Editor Page (a Pulitzer Prize—winning music critic) seems to have made Dawn Powell his life’s work: he has written a biography, edited her diaries, and successfully crusaded for the resurrection of her novels (most are again in print). If these pungent and brave letters are any indication, her novels are well worth a read.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-5364-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
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
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