There are better books on Eastwood, from a more recent perspective, but these fan’s notes reflect extraordinary access and...
This collection of previously unpublished, exhaustive interviews from three decades ago has a conversational intimacy that reveals as much about the journalist as they do about an actor-director he obviously worships.
The late Paul Nelson was a prescient critic, from his 1960s advocacy of the evolving Bob Dylan through his championing a decade later of the New York Dolls as pre-punk avatars and his late-’70s assessment of Clint Eastwood: “as imaginative and as different as any American director I can name.” This was well before critical acclaim and Oscars started flowing toward Eastwood, who was regarded as a spaghetti western star of limited range (a reactor rather than an actor) and reviled by the left as a Dirty Harry fascist. Readers who associate the veteran Rolling Stone editor-critic so strongly with music might be surprised to learn that his first love was film, and that Eastwood matched him reference for reference as their discussion ranges from Bergman to Kurosawa to Pauline Kael (the influential New Yorker critic who was particularly anti-Eastwood). “This book is a miracle,” says the introduction by Jonathan Lethem (who based an indelibly obsessive character in Chronic City on Nelson), and it’s a miracle that Nelson was unable to perform. Despite 17 hours of interview tape, he never made it past page four in the manuscript for his aborted cover story. Contributing to his writer’s block was his admiration for the artist. Editor Avery, who did a yeoman’s job of making the transcript flow chronologically, writes that Nelson was “as much a fan as he was an objective journalist”—though, in the case of Eastwood and others, Nelson was plainly much more of a fan than objective. Paralyzed by what his subject might think of the story as well as the daunting prospect of way too much material, he wrote little from this and published nothing, leaving the tapes for posthumous discovery.
There are better books on Eastwood, from a more recent perspective, but these fan’s notes reflect extraordinary access and frequent illumination.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4411-6586-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Continuum
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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