A smart memoir, wrapped inside an overly didactic advice book.
Herbert's (Creating the AHRC, 2008) latest book—half epistolary memoir, half advice guide— tells young adults why they should be serious about their work.
“I had often professed that a liberal education was good preparation for life,” the author writes in the book’s opening letter. “My worklife ended up testing that traditional guidance.” He then puts his education to good use, penning a total of 25 letters to “Jonah,” a stand-in for all young people who are gearing up to enter the adult workplace. The letters touch on issues of philosophy, history and psychology, while also recounting anecdotes about Herbert’s life as a working stiff and his struggle to make a difference in an indifferent world. The autobiographical fragments manage to be both sobering in their depiction of cold bureaucratic work and inspirational in their optimism in the face of adversity. Herbert notes that he takes his inspiration from Swiss film director Alain Tanner’s 1976 classic, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, about youth in the aftermath of the social upheavals of the late ’60s. He quotes a line from the film: “In twenty-five years the century will spit him out….That’s the time left for us to help him get off the shit-pile.” The author takes the same admirable stance—that older generations have an obligation to make the world better for younger ones. However, the book does become repetitive, reminding readers again and again about how harsh and heedless the adult world can be. This isn’t particularly surprising or insightful advice, especially considering that the world of the young can also be harsh and heedless, and some readers may feel it to be condescending. Overall, the book might have benefited from a less heavy-handed approach. But when the gloom and doom are wiped away, one finds a remarkably beautiful book underneath. Perhaps if Herbert had concentrated his efforts into a narrative form, he could have achieved his noble goals more effectively.
A smart memoir, wrapped inside an overly didactic advice book.Pub Date: May 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615948560
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Agora Associates of Metropolitan Washington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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