Not consistently hilarious, but quite pleasant and harmless. (16 line drawings)
Cowboy poet, former large-animal vet, NPR pundit, and essayist Black (Cactus Tracks and Cowboy Philosophy, 1997, etc.) is back, fooling with the kinds of large animals that wear blue jeans and can read.
There’s an occasional semi-serious piece on the gentrification of the West or the war against terrorism, but in most of these ten dozen really short tall tales the comical dialect is constant, the patois thick, and the glossary no more use than cow patties at an urban weddin’. The horsing around zips past like juniper berries in a Texas cyclone, so if the yarn about the bull in the chicken house doesn’t suit, perhaps the story of the heifer in the fishing line will. What about the cowboy who lost his dally and spilled into the arroyo: Ain’t that funny? Well, maybe it depends on the telling. It does seem that working at the rear end of a cow gives a feller a certain humorous worldview as well as a way with words. Bax describes, for example, a duster that “weighed more than a wet hallway carpet,” or being so broke he was “down to no keys.” Most of the pieces exist in a cowboy time that seems to be as independent as cowboy ways. (There is a reference to “ten-year-old copies of Look magazine,” though that journal died more than 30 years ago.) With frequent allusions to pickup trucks, skittish bovines, old dogs, and abrupt physical injury, the text seems designed primarily for those who affect knowledge in the use of a rope, a saddle, or a toolbox, but Bax is clearly also aware of readers “from outside the real world,” or as he terms them, “gentiles.” Punching cows for punch lines and throwing a 700-pound Bramer bull with aplomb may not be Noël Coward, but it’s fair day’s work for a cowpoke, after all.
Not consistently hilarious, but quite pleasant and harmless. (16 line drawings)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-61090-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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