Cable TV satirist Miller (The Rants, 1996) is throwing his barbed tantrums again, dispensing some seriously smart-alecky stuff between his patented opener, “I don’t want to get off on a rant here,” and his closing tag, “that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.” Generally, of course, he is not wrong. He’s not supposed to be. The outrage is often common sense, but with an attitude. With the ephemeral topicality of a Will Rogers and the no longer arresting vocabulary of a Lenny Bruce, Miller (with his writers) expresses unique scorn for typical targets like lawyers, kitsch, and O.J. Simpson, as well as bad habits (“You’ve got bad eating habits if you use a grocery cart in 7 Eleven, okay?”) and Senator D’Amato (“waste of an apostrophe”). He’s against bad guys. He is, it seems, on the side of Mother’s Day, feminism, and the pleasures of parenthood. Often, he verges on the politically correct. Hey, so he’s not the counterculture iconoclast his way out hip scat riffs would indicate, okay? His preaching is founded on pop culture, so forget about the deep semiotics; he’s just got the rants (or, as he calls it, “pay cable rant syndrome”). Style is all, and it’s quite sufficient. Figures of speech, from irony and hyperbole to metonymy and synecdoche, abound. Once and future nonentities who may or may not have once appeared in the ‘zines seem to be cited simply for the musicality of their names. Trent Reznor, Lance Henricksen, Elsa Klensch—these are household names? It’s all very trendy and, as we know, trendy is hip. And Miller, the old philosopher, is nothing if not hip. As luck would have it, he’s also pretty funny in these in-your-face monologues. His patented sarcasm machine produces another caustic and clever, albeit impermanent, little volume.
Pub Date: June 5, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-48852-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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