A brilliant idea dullishly done, as Rosenberg (ed., Testimony, 1989; trans., The Book of J, 1990) asks 23 well-known novelists, poets, and literary critics to name their earliest life-changing movie—and then to sit through it again today via videocassette. The job finds many of Rosenberg's contributors recalling the theaters and neighborhoods where the first viewing took place—a theme that gets tiresome. Critic Harold Bloom takes the zany approach, however, choosing W.C. Fields's glorious The Fatal Glass of Beer, a 20-minute short that so knocked him out on first viewing that he had to be carried out of the theater for a drink and missed the main feature. Bloom, of course, recognizes his opportunity to enthuse about ``the aesthetics of outrage'' he finds embodied in the farce and compares Fields's film more than favorably with Titus Andronicus and Gravity's Rainbow. Which hints at a flaw in perhaps half of the contributors, who tend to overblow their themes. Meg Wolitzer, though, does well in recalling Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt as the first picture ever to reveal the confusions of a real adolescent girl faced with a male world, while Joyce Carol Oates on the ``cinematically immortal'' and ``mythopoetic'' figure of Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning's version of Dracula wavers between real feeling and ground-out academicism. Perhaps the most moving single moment in the book is Philip Lopate's description of taking a girlfriend to see Carl Dreyer's Ordet, with its audacious climactic resurrection scene in a which an atheist Danish farmer's dead wife sits up in her coffin and holds out her arms to him: Lopate cries and his girlfriend punches him. ``You see, you can take it in films, but you can't take it in life!'' she says. Other contributors include Jayne Anne Phillips on The Premature Burial, Russell Banks on Bambi, Leonard Michaels on Gilda, and Leslie Epstein on The Devil in Miss Jones. Too heavy-handed, too archetypal by half.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-84087-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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