A verbose and sprawling, yet well-researched and compelling, narrative history of how literary iconoclasts have run afoul of censors in America. For more than 80 years, beginning with the so-called ``Comstock Act'' of 1873, the federal government and the states cracked down on sexually oriented material, until the Warren Court, led by Justice William Brennan, sought to protect creative expression by taking on the nettlesome issue of defining obscenity (notably through the ``utterly without redeeming social value'' criterion). First Amendment attorney de Grazia (Law/Cardozo Law School; co-author, Banned Films, 1982)—who argued the landmark obscenity cases involving Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch—details the legal and personal reverses and victories experienced in this struggle by authors, publishers, and booksellers. Quoting extensively, even ad nauseam, from the participants, his account is at its most riveting and accessible for nonlawyers in depicting the adversity faced by the likes of Lawrence, Joyce, Dreiser, Edmund Wilson, Henry Miller, Burroughs, and Nabokov. Like many an author whose years of work have left him loath to leave anything out, however, de Grazia could have used an editor less squeamish about reducing his frequent redundancies and tangents (although the book is about American law, foreign cases involving Zola's La Terre and Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness are covered at length, as are the nonliterary trials of Lenny Bruce). Predictably, the author sees recent imbroglios involving 2 Live Crew, Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, etc., in the light of past cases, barely acknowledging new concerns about sexual violence, government art-funding, or the need to shield children from ever more explicit material. Despite its flaws, then, an essential reference on how artistic rebels have defied social norms on creative expression— and on how the judiciary has responded in incremental, sometimes contradictory, ways.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-57611-X
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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