Fiction writer Babitz (Black Swans, 1993) offers essays about her love for partner dance and the L.A. dance scene. Eve Babitz loves to dance. From tango, to Cajun, to West Coast Swing, she sees the magic inherent in the forms; like many other dance students, she works toward a form that she knows she will never attain. And she works hard’she originally wanted to call her book “I Went from Being a Wallflower to Dancing Every Night of the Week, After Only Nine Years of Dance Lessons.” Babitz continues to dance as much as she can, despite a foot that won—t allow her to wear heels for long (a hindrance in the tango, traditionally the domain of high-heeled women), a knee that can—t handle the “voodoo torque” of West Coast Swing, and, later, legs severely burned in a freak car fire. Babitz consistently links her love of dance to her love of Los Angeles, and she never describes a particular dance without mentioning who its best teachers are and where the best local club for dancing it is—as well as whether there’s parking. (This is L.A., after all.) Sometimes the jumble of names, facts, and places strikes sparks, as in her essay on West Coast Swing—a dance that, Babitz maintains, “has the worst name in the world”—in which she mixes up history, steps, personalities, and music in a way that seems to echo the form she’s talking about. Unfortunately, this information stew doesn—t work as well when she’s writing about tango, or the Cajun Fais Do-Do. Dance teachers, dance partners, and L.A. locations fly by in an entertaining whir, but the author never provides a coherent picture of what these dances feel or look like. Dancers and Angelenos will be entertained; non-dancers or non-residents might want to consider taking a class or two before trying out this step. (10 line drawings, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-83392-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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