Some fine work here, mostly new, utilizing sleeplessness as a theme or starting point and comprising, the editors note, ``a catalog of experiences and a way of understanding a massive cultural phenomenon.'' While labeling insomnia a ``cultural phenomenon'' may overstate the case, literary agent Cheney and book editor Hubbert do have a point when they claim that the malady ``is so widespread among writers that it seems almost a prerequisite.'' They cite the well-known insomnia of such figures as Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Brontâs, although none of them are represented in this collection of essays and stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald's ``Sleeping and Waking'' (from The Crack-Up), one of the few older pieces, is as powerful now as it was in the 1930s. In it the alcoholic writer traces his grinding insomnia ``to a single mosquito'' on the 20th floor of a Manhattan hotel. His drunken ``dark hours'' are in sharp contrast to the punchy nights when the novelist Annie Proulx cannot sleep: She reads, writes, even sings (loudly). Mary Morris's story, ``Animal Rescue,'' finds a former city dweller disturbed by the pre-dawn noises of suburbia, most prominently the crying of a frightened cat. A couple of pieces offer unusual variations on the theme: Lynne Sharon Schwartz's deft tale ``Acquainted with the Night,'' about a man who lies awake cataloging ``all the bad things he had ever done,'' and Paul West's viciously funny story, ``Buying the Farm,'' featuring two airline pilots who put each other to sleep by reading ``accident reports . . . somehow banishing the ghost of what might have been by insisting on the worst.'' Lynne Tillman chips in with an effective, depressing story of a woman who finally confronts a neighbor whose auto repairs at 5 a.m. serve as a perfect image of the seething aggression behind city life. A good idea and a good mix of old and new, quirky and standard, funny and moving. Worth staying up for.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47771-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
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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