A dauntingly thorough, vast chronicle of the life and hard times of one of America's preeminent literary humorists. Thurber (18941961) was a rare double-threat talent. Not only did he write some of the funniest and most pellucid prose this side of Mark Twain, he was also a formidable cartoonist/caricaturist, his fluid, essential style attracting admirers as diverse as Matisse and Paul Nash. One of the New Yorker's first staffers, he dominated the magazine for years, writing and illustrating large swaths of it to growing acclaim until his sight began to fail. Eventually he had to give up drawing entirely and dictate his stories and voluminous correspondence. As with many satirists, his early, gentle humor (parodies, wordplay, lampoons of the ``war'' between men and women) turned darker and more bilious as he got older. He became a mean, obstreperous drunk, given to increasingly misogynistic outbursts—a gross inversion of the meek, harried Walter Mitty characters he was so famous for. But unlike many humorists, he has stood the test of time remarkably well, his work witty and elegantly concise. The same cannot be said for Kinney's biography. More than 30 years in the making, it is a labor of too much love. Kinney, a former reporter for the New Yorker, sucks every fact, event, and analysis dry. Even in these unhappy times when bloated biographies rule the earth, 1,200 pages on Thurber is simply grotesque. Kinney has done some formidable original resource work, interviewing most of Thurber's acquaintances, and his judgments on Thurber and his work are exquisitely perceptive. But at half the length, this biography would have been twice as penetrating and so much better suited to its subject. Definitive, but much too much of a good thing. (32 pages illustrations)
Pub Date: Nov. 23, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-3966-X
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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