Reeves, with an assist from a team of strategically deployed spectacle-watchers, gets right into the raucous spirit of the Democrats' extravaganza at Madison Square Garden, picking up on everyone from Chairman Robert Strauss to 17-year-old Clare Smith, official youngest delegate, to Annie the whore who fell short of her $800 per diem expectations. It's a frenzied, hysterical circus with hundreds of private campaigns going on even as the delegates prepare to nominate the peanut farmer. Reporting on all the carefully-rigged media spontaneity, Reeves doesn't miss a beat: from the NYPD bomb-sniffing labrador, to Tom Hayden the California delegate and Tom Hayden ("the real Tom Hayden") who set up the telephone communications system, Reeves leapfrogs from podium to massage parlor to hotel suites. He will tell you all about Carter's "private section," which Reeves claims contained a little "espionage room"—the better to bug the communications systems of the other candidates. L.A. lost out on the Convention because, well, "The Democrats were convinced that the governor of California was crazy" and the word was out to keep him from the podium at all costs. The Svengali of the proceedings is Strauss who had, early on, perceived that his party required "sedation" to avoid the cantankerous divisiveness that led to flubbing it in '68 and '72. Amid the barrage of overheard, overheated conversations, many of which won't bear repeating in polite society, Reeves has time to wonder if Carter, with his ritual laying on of hands, represents some new kind of political force, if Strauss' convention—stage-managed to contain the "weirdos"—bespeaks a day when candidates and Presidents may lead via primitive symbolism. . . . Anyone who didn't get tickets for the fabulous floor show can be there via this vastly entertaining, adrenalin-rush of a book.
Pub Date: March 1, 1977
ISBN: 0151225826
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1977
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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