A gathering of savories, many revelatory, each a delight and a small work of art.
Smooth and snazzy collection of travel and set pieces from New Yorker staffer Orlean (The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, 2001, etc.).
Orlean’s not just a sharp writer, but a generous one, giving the most unlikely places a chance to show her their stuff. Like Midland, Texas, the bleached and searing town where George H.W. Bush made his fortune and George W. Bush never made a dime. Or Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Manhattan, where she hobnobs with the class president and pokes her head into the detention hall: “The pent-up annoyance and disaffection and peevishness, the teenage fury of the fifty or so kids inside the room, almost blew me out the door.” She climbs Mount Fuji in a wild storm and marvels that “Thailand, the most pliant of places, has always accommodated even the rudest of visitors.” Orlean’s sly humor perfumes her writing with a wonderful quiet crackle, like pine needles on fire. “The Bannicks are among the last people in the state of Michigan, and possibly in the entire known universe, who still have their telephone service on a party line.” She creates an atmosphere of surprise and amazement when attending a fertility blessing in Bhutan (depicted in a peerless, vest-pocket travelogue) or visiting an African music shop in Paris. She is a master at grabbing attention with a story’s first few lines: “When I went to Scotland for a friend’s wedding last summer, I didn’t plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course.” Orlean closes with some short items that highlight the devil in her: a tour of the Maidenform Bra Museum, an explanation of why she is glad Tina Turner didn’t stay in her apartment when she was away—nothing against Tina; all visitors are homewreckers.
A gathering of savories, many revelatory, each a delight and a small work of art.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-46293-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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