A relentlessly explicit and deliberately incendiary sendup of modern American society.
A raunchy collection of skits, rants and fantasies about American politics and pop culture.
“DJ Ass Maggots” (Poseidon’s Tunnel, 2014, etc.) returns with a third book loosely structured around his Facebook page and its various comments fields generated by a “Council” going under such pseudonyms as Joey G, Neil Armstrong and LPR. These and many other voices are interjected into the author’s own as they tell pornographic stories, relate pornographic personal anecdotes, tell pornographic jokes and occasionally make deliberately provocative observations about events in the news. There’s an open letter to troubled former Hollywood star Lindsay Lohan; a list of “the 10 rules of drunk driving,” thinly veiled excoriations of bad roommates, acidic snapshots of Los Angeles night life and frequent allusions to outrageous conspiracy theories—that rapper Tupac Shakur is still alive, that singer Michael Jackson actually died filming a Pepsi commercial and was replaced by a white actor for the rest of “his” life, etc. More serious events such as the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Boston Marathon bombings are likewise exposed to the paranoid sarcasm of the author and his various “guest voices” (about the latter, for instance, “Night Writer, Esq.” writes, “Those of you idiots who don’t see that the Boston bombing—which was carried out on Patriots’ Day, the anniversary of the first shots of the US Revolutionary War—was in fact the first shot of World War III are living in the sweet bliss of ignorance”). This vaguely counterculture tone pervades the book (“are the student protestors here?” goes the rallying cry at one point. “Good. Are all the sovereign citizens here? Anarchists? Check. Anonymous hackers? Good”), and readers who can’t get enough of that kind of thing—fans of the author’s previous books among them—will find much more to entertain them here. Readers coming from a more conventional orientation will find this a toxic, misogynistic, hateful, sneering and tedious mess, and when told at one point “Maybe you shouldn’t have bothered reading this” will for once agree completely with the author.
A relentlessly explicit and deliberately incendiary sendup of modern American society.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499542264
Page Count: 324
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
