Every week, from Oct. 3, 1964 to Oct. 2, 1965, John O'Hara wrote a syndicated column. His contract ran for one year and was not renewed; he wouldn't take a pay cut and the syndicate wasn't making enough money out of him. Reading the collected columns explains why. O'Hara is not about to adopt any Dale Carnegie stance to woo agreement. He warned his readership of this right from the start and proved it in the second column, in which he said that the anti-cigarette advertising was getting as ridiculous as the hard sell tobacco commercials had been. Later, he looked into the Community Chest and didn't like what he found. He does admire de Gaulle, but the Kennedy family not at all. Prince Philip's occupational grousing annoyed him. He laughed at Lady Bird's trial flight as a literary critic. He didn't care for either Edward R. Murrow or Adlai Stevenson in life and saw no reason to change his mind when they died. He felt that on at least one occasion, Martin Luther King got way out of line. O'Hara squabbled vigorously and personally all over a full range of irritations. Some of his critics found him arrogant and captious in roughing up other brand name authors. He needles Liberals unmercifully and thumps the Republican tub. But he did have a readership some delighted, and others who read him to feel their blood pressure rise it hasn't since Westbrook Pegler stopped ranting, and this is The Compleat Curmudgeon in print.
Pub Date: April 14, 1966
ISBN: 0451031962
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1966
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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