Although this collection is too much of a good thing, one can't help looking forward to subsequent volumes: Thompson is just...
Fear and loathing, aphorism and malediction, mischief and indigence, fill this galvanically gonzo collection of Thompson's early letters.
The omnipresence of telephones and e-mail probably ensure that Thompson (Songs of the Doomed, 1990, etc.) will be one of the last of the great letter writers. But even in more epistolary times, few could rival the approximately 20,000 missives to his name. He came of age in the early 1950s, a silver age of American literature when a writing life was still considered heroic, and colossi like Faulkner and Hemingway bestrode the earth. From an early age Thompson felt himself destined for similar literary greatness, and so he carefully made carbon copies of every letter he sent. Though the sheer bulk of this collection makes one wish he'd been a little less conscientious, there are some gems here. Thompson writes the kinds of letters most of us wish we had the guts to send. He brilliantly berates agents for rejecting his work, sends out rude, fantastical excuses to his creditors, applies insultingly for a variety of jobs, and even offers his services to Lyndon Johnson as the governor of American Samoa. Thompson is one of our great polemical stylists, and these letters reveal just how seriously he approached the craft of writing (belying his trademark hell-raising insouciance). He is also preoccupied with something that concerns many great artists: lack of funds. Almost every letter finds him trying to scrounge up money. Biographically, these letters take Thompson from his stint in the air force to his early attempts to break into journalism, following his peregrinations across the Americas and on to his first great success, his 1967 book on the Hell's Angels.
Although this collection is too much of a good thing, one can't help looking forward to subsequent volumes: Thompson is just so damned entertaining.Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-40965-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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