A project for which there could scarcely be less demand: not just another telling of the numbingly well-documented life of Beat Generation warhorse Jack Kerouac, but one penned by the indefatigably irrelevant Beat crony Barry Miles. This completes the trilogy started with Miles’s clumsy biographies of Allen Ginsberg (1989) and William S. Burroughs (1993), only this time his subject wasn—t around to help him out with insights and information. Miles notes the obvious, that Kerouac’s —work is located in an uneasy limbo between fiction and memoir,— and mentions repeatedly Kerouac’s desire that his works should ultimately form a single epic saga. Yet he undercuts himself, on the one hand, by criticizing Kerouac’s work as inaccurate autobiography, and on the other by relying on the writings as a source of biographical detail. The result is a hash of conflicting perspectives. Aside from a prurient emphasis on Kerouac’s gay sexual forays, Miles offers little that’s new and much that’s absurd. Having established that Kerouac was a pathologically irresponsible, abusive, mixed-up drunk, Miles rants fatuously about Kerouac’s refusal to acknowledge his daughter: —Where was Kerouac when he should have been reading his daughter bedtime stories, sharing with her his love for words?— Miles claims that Kerouac introduced —a level of candour previously unknown in modern literature . . . at a time when real men were strong silent types who didn—t cry or even say very much,— yet he fails to provide any context or justification for such assertions. Identifying Kerouac’s never-revised, often meaningless ’spontaneous prose— as generated by a method —normally used for rapidly written pulps and romance novels,— Miles fails to distinguish between Kerouac’s lazy, amphetamine-fueled hubris and the more substantial, less volatile craft of the genre writer. One respects Miles only for admitting that huge amounts of Kerouac’s work are wretched. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-6043-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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
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
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