A bath of musical memory and association, drenched with emotion, time, and space.
Rumbling thoughts, sonorous and percussive as a truck driving over a plank bridge, on how the author makes sense of the music he hears and connects it to his life.
For O’Brien (Castaways of the Image Planet, 2002, etc.), music is a sweeping environment, a closet of memories, a looking glass, a visitation, a map of individualized reality, essential and immense. The songs he has appropriated have “a climate, a history, a state of being.” Sometimes they express a certain bitterness, remind you of “a scene already over by the time any public ever caught its afterglimmer . . . a succession of parties that one hadn’t attended.” They may have fallen into a memory hole, “that limbo where unrecorded dance bands play without interruption for the ghosts of the unremembered” (though O'Brien remembers well). Or they may achieve pure transcendence and “stop moments from passing. The song is the place where perfection stays.” O’Brien offers chewy ruminations on Brian Wilson and the Beatles, on minor-key melodies like “Greensleeves” and “Oranges and Lemons”: “universal folk music that dares to propose unhappy endings not only for individual lives but for life itself.” Music becomes a landscape in which “to lose yourself, or more properly to empty yourself of yourself,” to erase history as you keep on building more of it. Your record collection is more revealing than any resume, the very “substance of what pleased you,” with songs as loyal as dogs. Despite all the fiddlings and knockdowns, the self-criticism and the moments of overthinking (“it is a definition intended to undermine the notion of definition as such”), O'Brien, as much as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, is saved by music. Everyone is, he asserts: “People sing when they no longer know who they are. They sing not to remember what was but to be in its presence.”
A bath of musical memory and association, drenched with emotion, time, and space.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58243-192-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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