These dated Village Voice columns might never have resurrected themselves if the perpetually adolescent Johnston (Jasper Johns: Privileged Information, 1996) were not a lesbian separatist, and if it weren't perennially hip to be contrarian. Johnston is, as she says with such overbearing glee, ``hopelessly narcissistic.'' She never tires of recounting with nauseating bravado her cheap sexual exploits, of ``anal orgasm'' and ``masturbation fantasies [that] are virtuosic.'' Of course, being a self-styled revolutionary, she considers monogamy an ``archaic form of bondage'' and the mother-daughter bond one of ``elephantal cuntsequence.'' As a ``lesbian chauvinist,'' naturally, she asserts that ``all women are lesbians except those who don't know it yet,'' and in the caustic style so typical of this book she barks that ``women don't like to be fucked by men any more and in fact never did.'' She thinks it fiendishly Joycean to parody Catholic liturgy as follows: ``Maria, full of grease, the load is with me!'' Next to real writers like Andrea Dworkin, whose bold verbiage did indeed change the way we thought, Johnston is a callow hack. Since many of these pieces were already reprinted in her previous books Lesbian Nation and Gullibles Travels, one wonders why they needed yet another airing. Thankfully, Johnston has given up her Gertrude Stein act of late and gone on to finer things than the joys of groupie fame—that is, biography and criticism, those quaint arts of writing about other people.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-85242-450-8
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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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