Strictly for the fan club.
A loosely fitting collection of shaggy-dog stories, anecdotes and book reports by novelist and screenwriter Gifford (The Stars Above Veracruz, 2006, etc.).
Gifford allows, early on, that it is his good fortune to have survived as a writer when “only one percent of writers are able to support themselves solely by their writing.” In some parts of the world, in fact, he is famous; one of the more charming of the travel vignettes finds him in a Cohiba factory in Cuba, where a lector—a person who reads aloud to the rollers of big cigars—smitten by his Wild at Heart promises to read it next, after finishing an off-the-rack romance novel. Some of the anecdotes are mildly cautionary: It’s never a good idea, we learn, to go shooting with William Burroughs. Some are quietly illuminating; a scholarly film buff, Gifford turns in a fine reading of Marlon Brando’s enigmatic film One-Eyed Jacks, even if he cannot resist an annoying breeziness as he goes (Karl Malden: “The best nose in the business.” Richard Widmark: “a considerably thinner actor [than Brando]”). At the center of the book, accounting for more than a third of its bulk, is a less successful enterprise: a set of brief essays on Gifford’s favorite books. It’s thin gruel; in 83 words, for instance, Gifford dispatches The Great Gatsby as “perhaps the only almost-perfect novel ever written”—whatever that means—while an even shorter assessment of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger avers that “Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer, maybe worse, but there is still truth in this book that doesn’t go away.” Gifford aficionados will surely be pleased, though, by the book’s concluding pages, which contain his libretto for a Japanese “action musical” complete with a burning curtain and an omniscient hermaphrodite.
Strictly for the fan club.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56858-334-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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