The bad-taste life of a relentless sexual and political rebel and ever-scandalous bad boy of Italian cinema and the arts. Depending on your sexual and artistic likes, this behemoth will be a riveting or overwhelmingly tiresome experience. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) was a loose cannon even among his chosen brotherhood of gays: Though daily he played his homosexuality out to its most dangerous limit, he fought against gay rights, saying that to give gays political strength is to castrate their nonconformity and weaken their need to slap society on its cheek. A Marxist, he upbraided the Communist Party whenever it threatened to conform or to play footsie with the Church. An atheist, he made what may remain the starkest, most truth-seeking life of Christ ever filmed, The Gospel According to St. Matthew. He was, in short, a creature of bitter contradictions and focused on being contradictory and unacceptable. According to first-time author Schwartz, at the heart of the man and the artist lay a white-hot, molten mother-love, returned twofold by Susanna, his mother. Throughout adult life and despite his obsessed nightly search for a complaisant adolescent, Pasolini was ever under his mother's roof. She waited up, and he adored and sanctified her. Having worked up a reputation as a notorious poet/essayist/novelist, he began his film career as a scenarist for Fellini and Bolognini, then graduated to directing. His filmmaking falls into three periods, with a startling turn from antisocial subjects to a trilogy of erotic medieval classics that Pasolini thought the most subversive of his works in that they showed the common summer- warmth lost by sterile present-day society. Encyclopedic, microscopic portrait of a lean and thin-lipped narcissist, murdered by a 17-year-old thug he was paying to service. (Thirty-two pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-57744-2
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
