A riveting, masterfully crafted memoir by essayist and novelist Cooper (A Year of Rhymes, 1993, etc.) that should find a wide readership beyond the gay market. Really a sequence of autobiographical essays, the book mostly concerns how Cooper's experience of being gay has affected him throughout his life. The life in question is superficially ordinary: Cooper grew up middle-class and vaguely Jewish in Los Angeles in the '60s, the only child of a divorce lawyer and a housewife; he went to college and eventually began teaching literature. Although chronologically ordered, the chapters sometimes leap decades to draw thematic connections and reinforce emotional epiphanies. At the end of a chapter about his childhood entitled ``Imitation of Life,'' for instance, Cooper recalls strolling West Hollywood's exuberant gay strip one night in his 25th year at the moment that, unbeknownst to him, his mother died in bed. Capturing perfectly the simultaneous tragedy and thrill of the moment, he concludes with heartbreaking grace: ``The night was warm, impending, alive, as if longing itself were an aspect of the air, like humidity or wind.'' Cooper's tales of youth, particularly one about disposing of a cache of pornography, can be very funny as well as psychologically astute. When he covers common markers of the gay experience, from adolescent crushes and coming out to therapy and the gym, he avoids clichÇs entirely; several splendid passages, such as one about an affair with a stand-up comic who gradually spiraled downward into mental illness, read like tragicomic fiction. Great set pieces abound, as when he and his widower father find themselves equally incapable of open discussion about their romantic lives. And Cooper's account of how AIDS has entered his life is as honest and unsparing as any yet written. Recalling his impressions with what feels like uncanny accuracy, Cooper at once inhabits his memories and reshapes them with detachment. This is exhilarating writing. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-74539-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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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