Despite some nice miniatures, a snide, rather pointless, lazy book.
In his fiction (Redback, 1987; Peeping Tom, 1985, etc.) and now with this travelogue/sociologue/personalogue about his semi-Jewishness, Jacobson seems fated never quite to cast off the perception of him as a Philip Roth wannabe perpetually one step behind (both in talent and intellectual plasticity) his American master.
Given a deal by the BBC and PBS to wander Jewish venues such as the Concord resort, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Israel, and his grandparents' Lithuania, Jacobson is ever defensively atwitter, waving the antenna of his jokey skepticism. He detests the religious like the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the Hasidim of Jerusalem not only because they no doubt would be scandalized by Jacobson's gentile wife and his own secularism but also on the grounds of aesthetics: "How is it that austerity on matters of religious faith and ritual almost invariably accompanies laxity in matters of art, music, proportion, tact, ethics, manners, civic probity, passing decency and whatever else you can think of that isn't religious faith and ritual.'' Had he spent less time flexing his condescension, Jacobson might have been able to arrive at some provisional conclusions as to why (there are an established few, after all, not all of them anti-Semitic, too)—but, instead, his screed is wrapped inside a Carnegie Deli corned-beef sandwich of wise-guy superiority and overeducated disaffiliation.
Despite some nice miniatures, a snide, rather pointless, lazy book.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-87951-521-X
Page Count: 502
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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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