A charming set of tales that’s funny, heartwarming, and haunting, by turns.
Ordinary folks tell ordinary—and sometimes extraordinary—stories in this sparkling anthology of essays culled from live, spoken-word performances.
Debut editors Silverman and Bravo include 60 nonfiction pieces from “Bar Flies,” their live storytelling series, which they’ve hosted in a Phoenix, Arizona, bar since 2015. As in “The Moth” and similarly anecdotal shows, the fare consists of short, first-person essays—each a few pages long in the text—focusing on tidbits of memoir, family histories, character sketches, and shaggy dog anecdotes; the latter is exemplified by Deborah H. Sussman’s piquant portrait of her border collie, Henry, and the Frisbee games that he apparently played with a ghost. Other highlights beguilingly run the gamut of emotion, including Amy L. Young’s truly raucous account of a meth-fueled Christmas, capped by a theft of oyster stuffing (“That fishy, mushy bread was FUCKING MAGICAL”); Amanda Kate Kehrberg’s droll look at a Dragon Con fantasy convention (“When I watch ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ I know I should feel more fear at the dark vision of a fascist state, but I can’t help envy government regulated, monochromatic wardrobes”); and Cindy Dach’s engagingly wry memories of family wisdom (“When I was 11, my grandmother told me that I should not be a virgin on my wedding night because that would be a terrible time to find out that my husband did not know what he was doing”). Also notable are Salvador Lee Bravo’s nerve-wracking account of an odyssey through Ukraine, Stacy Pearson’s self-lacerating retrospective on her public relations work for a businessman facing #MeToo allegations, and James A. Ahlers’ anguished narrative of his wife’s troubled pregnancy. Overall, readers will find that the collection has real literary quality—and the ring of hard-won, homespun truth.
A charming set of tales that’s funny, heartwarming, and haunting, by turns.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-59121-6
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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