Could have been funnier, should have been kinder.
The memoirs of an acidic curmudgeon and widower.
After his beloved wife Iris Murdoch died, Bayley (Iris and Her Friends, 1999, etc.) was besieged by well-wishers offering assistance and companionship. Margot and Mella, the two most irrepressible of the gaggle of helpmeets, zipped into his life with a feminine force that rendered the man helpless to avoid their tireless ministrations. One slipping innocently into his bed, the other staging a full-frontal seduction, Margot and Mella riotously overturned the author’s nascent widower’s lifestyle of reclusive seclusion with their zealous determination to help one who does not want to be helped. The ingredients for a delightful farce or comedy of manners lie in bountiful supply within this material, but Bayley fails to take advantage of these possibilities with his snide commentary. Perhaps too honest in his reactions, he assails the reader with his ambivalent distaste for this humorously affable pair. It’s an authorial blunder that casts him as the unlikely villain of his own life story even when he does admit his own culpability in the soap opera around him. Couple this cranky tone with a literature professor’s overenthusiastic affection for literary allusion, and the result distills itself from a heartwarming and breezy consideration of life as a widower into a bitter diatribe against two generous (though perhaps needy) souls. Mercifully, Bayley’s humanity outshines his cantankerousness on occasion, as when he ponders over his life without Iris and finds new affections with his old friend Audi. His love for Iris is plangent and deep, filled with memory and their shared history; his love for Audi is fresh and budding, filled with possibilities and regeneration. Still, since you never know when this crocodile will snap, you’d better stand clear altogether.
Could have been funnier, should have been kinder.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-02561-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
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
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