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IN AND OUT OF VOGUE

By turns amusing, enlightening, and plaintive, the former kid from Newark who became editor of Vogue remembers her rise and explains her fallwith a little dishing on the side. The daughter of Italian immigrants Florence Bellofatto and Anthony Mirabella, a Ronrico rum salesman who gambled too much and introduced the daiquiri to America, Grace Mirabella launched herself at the postwar fashion establishment because she wanted to be around the best of everything. Rejecting retail, and with a degree from Skidmore and a lot of dancing at the Stork Club under her belt, in 1952 she invaded the WASPy CondÇ Nast world of Babses and Babes, of young editors chosen for their long legs and their connections to the Rockefellers. Women worked at Vogue to earn ``pin money,'' and it was infra dig to ask the cost of anything. Mirabella represented the arrival of the working woman at Vogue; she wanted to celebrate real clothing for really stylish and talented women, clothes that they could use to live full lives. Mirabella tells of her years as Diana Vreeland's assistant; she admires Vreeland's brains and glamour while at the same time cataloguing her eccentricities and excesses. After Vreeland's firing in 1971, she bemoans her own lack of loyalty to her former boss in taking her job. With the advent of the venal '80s, Mirabella also lost favor and was fired after a 17-year tenure. (The editor learned of her dismissal only after Liz Smith announced it on TV.) She blows a few poison darts at the fashion celebrities who made her life miserable, including Richard Avedon and Alex Liberman, the ``yellow Russian'' (in Vreeland's words), and describes her rebound to begin the magazine bearing her name. Occasionally the sad tale of a fashion victim, but most often an interesting, chatty view of the trenches at CondÇ Nast and in women's journalism. (32 b&w pictures, not seen) (Author tour)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-385-42613-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995

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I AM OZZY

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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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

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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