Just the sort of book to keep by your bed—a bundle of knowing laughs, though at whom is ever the question at hand.
John Hodgman is a busy man. And, on the strength of the published evidence, including this new book, a very strange man indeed.
Perhaps best known as the milquetoasty but oddly self-satisfied PC in the Apple commercials, Hodgman is a writer of considerable charm and much merit. As with More Information Than You Require (2008) and Areas of My Expertise (2005), this odd little volume delights in being…well, if not wrong, then bizarrely inventive, and rock-solid in the assuredness of the justice of his cause. Take this specimen, riffing on the old saw “You don’t have to be crazy, but it helps” (which Hodgman willfully misquotes to serve his murky purposes): “Well, guess what? The guy who made up that slogan probably made a million dollars, because it was very popular, and he printed it on food during the Great Depression.” Let us count the ways in which that is wrong—and also very funny. Which is entirely the point: Hodgman, a sometime colleague, aims to outdo Jon Stewart’s America and Earth book empire with sheer outré exuberance, and he succeeds at every step. Exhibit A: Everyone wants to be rich in America, right? Well, counsels Hodgman, that won’t happen, because “the billionaires who actually control the world would not allow it.” But what’s to stop you from believing you’re filthy rich, and who’s to say you’re not? That’s the glory of modern life—and because we live in a land of opportunity, strange and unpredictable things happen, which is just the reason, Hodgman asserts, that Wilt Chamberlain had to hire a “special sex butler.” Bad math, bad facts—it all adds up to what Jean-Paul Sartre would have called bad faith. But Sartre’s dead, and it’s Hodgman’s world—and besides, Sartre never wrote half as convincingly about the impending apocalypse that will be Ragnarok.
Just the sort of book to keep by your bed—a bundle of knowing laughs, though at whom is ever the question at hand.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-525-95244-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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