Burgess's best book and, he's said, his last: the second and final part of his autobiography, following Little Wilson and Big God (1986). Burgess's life-review, covering 1959 to 1982, equals his finest fiction, A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers. It opens with Burgess and his flopabout alcoholic wife Lynne just returned from Malaya and with Burgess, now 42, being told he has a brain tumor and only a year to live. Black farce underlies his sudden effort to ensure an income for his wife once he's dead: he sets out to write his first novel and, writing 2,000 words a day, produces five books in bis fatal final year—only to survive! But now he's a professional writer. Alas, fiction doesn't pay. He takes up book reviewing on a major scale, sells review copies by the suitcaseful, adds on TV and play reviewing, expands with the odd journalistic job, lecturing, touring, playwriting, scriptwriting for Hollywood and British TV—all the while turning out novel after novel. Dizzied reviewers await his novel of the month. Burgess has not time to be the artist he wants to be, is always in debt, odd-jobbing, and when he does rise above hackwork, as in Napoleon Symphony, it's a failure. But with book after book he does his best, despite terrible reviews. Meanwhile, Lynne collapses in public all over Europe, cuckolds him repeatedly, and never reads his books, although she does help him dress his heroines. When she dies, Burgess's real life begins. A former lover tells him she has a five-year-old son by him. Burgess insists on marriage. Then he meets Stanley Kubrick, who shows him the film he's made of A Clockwork Orange (after tossing out Burgess's script and filming his own). Its brilliance is a mixed blessing, with Burgess forever after condemned to public gaze. His last pages—a finely itemized inventory of his house, study, and general clutter—show wonderfully the small profits of the writer's trade. Tiptop—though the second half is less satiric.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1405-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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