The nation's most brilliant magazines in the first four decades of the 20th century, presented with style by the author of the sprightly Women of the 20s (1986). Douglas begins in the 1890's, with magazines that depended on circulation and kept their advertising to dull, cramped columns in the back pages. But as the US changed from a rural to urban society, he explains, advertising came to such bold and vivid new life that some magazines could have been given away free and still have shown big profits. The Smart Set took over from the notorious New York society weekly Town Topics, whose literary pages alternated with ``an unbridled appetite for salacious chatter and slander''—it was published by Colonel William D'Alton Mann, a blackmailer. In 1906, the young iconoclasts H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan were brought on board as book and theater reviewers and eventually became joint editors with the principal objective of giving all young ``literary bucks and wenches'' a place to show off their work. Their ten years of editorship brought first-class writers such as Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald into the fold; they finally left to found their own literary magazine, The American Mercury. On the other hand, Douglas explains, gentlemanly Frank Crowninshield's Vanity Fair was avant-garde, distinctive, and appealed to a sophisticated elite—and yet in 1915 topped all magazines for advertising. Vanity Fair was New York, and its three leading literary wits—Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood—founded the Algonquin Round Table. In some ways, ``hobo newspaperman'' Harold Ross's New Yorker displaced Vanity Fair, while Arnold Gingrich's overnight sensation, Esquire—featuring fact-pieces by Hemingway—prompted Vanity Fair's publisher to merge it with Vogue. Zesty, but not overly spiced.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-208-02309-7
Page Count: 242
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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