A mundane account of a pampered kid trying to find himself that offers nothing particularly illuminating, artful or...
Phillips gets writer’s block and ends up sucked into a chain of bad but lucrative businesses as he tries to figure out what to do with his life.
TV scripter Phillips had scads of talent, it seems, but little idea of how to apply it. The shambolic manner in which he tried to figure that out provides the grist for his memoir. Fresh out of the bucolic and positive-vibe-emitting environs of Marin County, Phillips published a roundly acclaimed novel (Tuscaloosa, 1994) at the ripe young age of 24. The expectations of further great work hamstrung his writing, and four years later he found himself depressed and on meds in Austin, struggling with “a doomed second novel.” Through a series of fortuitous personal connections leading via several degrees of separation to nascent South Park cartoonists Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Phillips wound up in California with a couple of friends, putting together a series of random cultural business ventures. They formed Certified Renegade American Product (CRAP) as an umbrella company to start ultra-indie film festivals that acted like self-proclaimed “barnacles” on the outskirts of Cannes and Sundance. They started a consulting business called Quiddity, a particularly ’90s entity that gave the spectacularly non-business-savvy Phillips and his coworkers the chance to be paid ridiculous amounts of money to formulate new names for companies or products. Not much came to fruition. The film festivals were just parties, and the businesses had little reason to exist; the author’s cynicism ballooned through the years of the Internet bubble. Phillips took a shot at acting in a porn film and made a short involving his penis. A feature idea that tried to merge Blair Witch–style POV filmmaking with Thomas Harris–like serial-killer profundity and millennial anxiety ultimately proved to be an exercise in sadism and colossal ego.
A mundane account of a pampered kid trying to find himself that offers nothing particularly illuminating, artful or self-reflective.Pub Date: March 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-8021-7028-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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