Dark and gritty comedy served with just a little too much rancor. Quinn squanders a promising opportunity in a memoir that...
The comedian and former Saturday Night Live Weekend Update host tackles race and political correctness.
At a certain point in this often jarring meditation about growing up in 1970s Brooklyn, the author warns readers that many of them will probably come away thinking he's an ass. He may be right about that. There’s little in this Irish comic’s impressions about nearly any race that hasn’t already been heard many times before. It’s true that Quinn's over-the-top generalizations about particular cultural predilections are clearly more comic than critique, but by now, hearing yet again how the Irish are like this, or the Asians are like that, and so on, will strike many as tiresome. Fortunately, Quinn doesn't rely too heavily on his ethnic jabs to score points, choosing wisely to expend just as much energy, if not more, on self-deprecation. Whether recounting a drunken and deranged attempt to rip off a couple of sex workers secretly armed with rock-lined handbags or a particularly ugly incident groping a sad and lonely shut-in during a liquor store home delivery, Quinn demonstrates a laudable frankness that probably didn’t automatically manifest itself once he sobered up. “Talk about beer muscles,” he writes. “When I drank I was convinced I was an intellectual martial arts champion. I swaggered around the streets of New York City like I owned them.” The heat-cooked asphalt and glass-strewn streets that helped shape the author’s former hard-living ways are, indeed, a richly textured font of engrossing escapades. Quinn excels best when recounting his alcohol-soaked adventures, although he never spends enough time in any one locale before he’s off again characterizing what he has found to be the best and worst in its diverse inhabitants.
Dark and gritty comedy served with just a little too much rancor. Quinn squanders a promising opportunity in a memoir that ping-pongs between bar-stool pontification and bad-boy confessional.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0759-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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