Seemingly effortless, entirely transportive.
Essays old and new from writer’s writer Conroy (Body and Soul, 1993, etc.), who eschews fireworks in favor of the dead-on observation as he considers topics ranging from fatherhood to the Rolling Stones to leaving New York.
The author kicks off this collection of pieces spanning 30 years with a few anecdotes that got left out of the original published versions (in periodicals ranging from the New York Times Magazine to GQ). There was the time he went to movie actor Steve McQueen's house to do an interview for Esquire and found the actor stark naked; and Conroy's profile of the Rolling Stones went a lot smoother after an accidental jam session with drummer Charlie Watts, even though Mick Jagger was a “narcissistic egomaniac” (another observation that never made it into print). The writer quickly moves away from these quirky celebrity moments to circle around to a more intimate topic: himself. We learn of young Conroy's relationship with his mostly absent father, conducted almost entirely through Frank’s absorption in Dad’s book collection. We read about the author’s obsession with scouting, which endured until a pivotal moment of disillusionment in Madison Square Garden. We continue through his personal life, learning of his failed first marriage, his departure from New York, and his meeting his second wife on the road to a garbage dump. The centerpiece here is an essay about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (of which Conroy is director) that distills his philosophy and approach into 14 tight pages. Among the typically laconic comments: “Writing is a mixture of knowing what you're doing and not knowing what you're doing.” The collection’s final third focuses on Conroy's jazz writing; in his account of sitting in on keyboards as a teenager at Sugar Ray's in Harlem, the “pure glee of a kid jumping up and down on the theater seat” leaps off the page.
Seemingly effortless, entirely transportive.Pub Date: April 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-15468-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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