A book on Ireland and the Irish that is conscientious, earnest, and, unlike its subject, a little dull. Ardagh (Germany and the Germans, 1987), a part of the great Irish diaspora, spent a good deal of time in Ireland between 1991 and 1993, traveling everywhere and meeting many prominent Irish men and women, some of whose comments form the most vivid parts of the book. In many ways Ireland, Ardagh suggests, is an even more curious place than its sometimes fey reputation would indicate. It is not only one of the poorest countries in Europe, but one of the most over-taxed and over-centralized, with the highest unemployment of any industrialized country. Its greatest talents have almost always gone abroad (Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, and their contemporaries). While its life ``is still lived with a particular gregarious intensity that seems more Mediterranean than northern,'' it is, says Ardagh, a more inhibited and controlled society than almost any other contemporary European country. And only now is it beginning to undergo a degree of emancipation, leading to the immortal words of one member of Parliament that ``there was no sex in Ireland until the BBC came.'' Ardagh is best on the north, which he had expected to find, paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes, ``nasty, British and short,'' but where he instead found the people to be ``marvelous, second to none.'' ``The Northern Irish may not be comprehensible,'' he quotes one source as saying, ``but they are very addictive,'' and his view even of the militant Protestant leader Reverend Ian Paisley—``an astute, gifted man of some stature, charismatic in his way''—is fair and thoughtful. A solid effort; though left to his own devices and deprived of the sometimes stimulating company he kept, Ardagh himself is rather pedestrian.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-241-13275-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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