A veteran humorist offers wry and shticky counsel on how to survive the ``rough patch'' of incipient male aging. Friedman (The Current Climate, 1989, etc.) has been plumbing urban neuroses for a while; here, he alternates chuckle-worthy insights with annoying absurdity. He opens with an amusing checklist for the SOG (e.g., ``You make it through the night without a trip to the bathroom and consider it a cause for celebration''), then lowers his aim by positing how memory loss might lead to an inadvertent phone conversation with Julia Roberts. On sex, he's a hoot: Using baseball terms, he proposes that the SOG should recognize the loss of his ``high hard one'' and instead ``develop a slider.'' He moves on to offer advice about diet (``listen carefully to your body''), appearance (``Nobody admires a Slightly Older Guy who looks like Howard Hughes''), and fitness (treadmills are ``an excellent way to get through Proust''). Regarding ex-wives, he is emphatic: ``The key to amiable coexistence...is to stay out of her life—and hope she stays out of yours.'' And on some bedrock issues, he's downright wise: Avoid feeling personal affronts at a contemporary's success, he warns. He's quite tender toward the concept of the Slightly Older Wife, who, he observes, ``has invested heavily in you.'' Be a good sport about your kids, he says, even if you suspect the child may not be yours. Friedman further offers thoughts on saving money (check Modern Maturity—in private, of course—for travel savings), possible later-life careers (limo driver, memoirist), even a run for office (oppose coddling criminals and TV violence). Finally, he counsels that SOGs tie up loose ends, decide what they want out of life, and proceed—with no whining. Slight, but for Friedman's target demographic, reliably fun. (illustrations)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80206-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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