Like a brain with a severed corpus callosum, this is a wide-spectrum collection of Ballard's heady essays from the '60s that address the future with visionary irony and recent newspaper reviews that concern a pathological, if mundane, present. On such topics as the automobile and the Space Age, or the personalities of Ralph Nader and Salvador Dali, Ballard (Rushing to Paradise, 1995, etc.) views the 20th century from a singular, removed perspective that is sometimes martian-like. Still, there is a world of difference between, say, his oracular overview of Surrealism for the "New Wave" science-fiction magazine New Worlds in 1966 and his prosaic review of a Dali biography in the Guardian in 1986. Ballard the socio-media decoder also proves able to temper his sensibilities when writing for the more banal channels of glossy magazines and Sunday papers. Biographies of Elvis, Howard Hughes, and Einstein, or histories of Hollywood writers, modern China, and comic books are alike easy work, his rarified intellect only subliminally present. He can respectfully, mischievously review Kitty Kelly's "chain-saw" biography of Nancy Reagan, but he did a far more creative hatchet job in bis satirical "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" in 1970 (not included here). The most notable pieces here tend to be from New Worlds, such as "Which Way to Inner Space," his call to recalibrate science fiction's "vocabulary of ideas" and focus less on technology and more on psychology: "The only truly alien planet is Earth," he writes. Yet at century's close, he can still mordantly praise suburban Shepperton's numbing environs and call for a London of Shanghai-esque decadence. Ironically, the closer Ballard approaches to the millennium, the more he blends futurism with ephemera and the more frequently he dwells on his past.
Pub Date: May 20, 1996
ISBN: 0312156839
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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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