A message for avid computer users from the author of The Cuckoo's Egg (1989): Get a life. Stoll, a 15-year veteran of the electronic information age, appears to have reached a stage of burnout that most computer junkies pray they will never see, and the result is a cranky meditation on how better to spend one's time. A strong plot was the key to the author's bestselling first book (about a computer spy ring), but here we find only ramblings from someone who sounds half the time like a technical writer and half the time like a hip graduate student with a thesis statement to prove. Stoll wastes an inordinate number of pages driving home the point that it's nicer to experience a sensation than it is to view a representation of it on your monitor. Advised in tones that suggest a revelation that exploring a cave, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and stargazing are more satisfying than punching in commands at the keyboard, readers may well wonder what on earth makes the author think them so misguided. There's no pleasing Stoll as he surveys cyberspace. For example, he slams most Usenet bulletin-board messages as futile, then complains that the messages are not catalogued. He has had it with e-mail, he announces—well, maybe it has something to do with his holding down six different online accounts. Stoll does provide some jollier moments, mostly in the form of truly wacky footnotes (in which we learn things like how to nail Jell-O to the wall) and in all-too-brief passages that herald back to his salad days of besting evil computer hackers. A staunch defender of library books and card catalogs, Stoll takes noble ideas and swamps them in a morass of overzealous grouching. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-41993-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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