A fun, cogent argument in favor of a dubious, often-damned art.
A champion punster finds hidden and significant meaning in cunning wordplay.
Pollack (Cork Boat: A True Story of the Unlikeliest Boat Ever Built, 2005, etc.), a former presidential speechwriter, was the 1995 winner of the O. Henry World Championship Pun-Off. The moderately puerile samples from that war of words, found in the introduction, should be overlooked in favor of the more sophisticated content that follows. His thesis is that puns, commonly reviled, have serious implications. After a generous definition, the author examines the etymology, neurology, anthropology and sociology of primeval gags, antique jokes and hoary wordplay. Pollack finds puns in ancient cuneiform tablets, today’s newspaper headlines, knock-knock jokes, TV comedy and movies—and, of course, in Master Shakespeare’s copious riffs. There have always been more groans than giggles from pungent critics like Sam Johnson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, but Pollack counter punches in his defense of punning, holding it to be no real mistreatment of one’s mother tongue but simply an arty vice. He provides examples of the penchant by embedding puns throughout his short text. A conjuror at this literary con game, many of his best are concealed, challenging the reader to find them all. Thus, one relevant problem is that students will long be on the alert to finding puns, present or not, in unrelated reading. Another and more perilous threat is that reviewers, those scoffing wretches, will feel challenged to pun in appraisals of this book. But, at least in this case, the pun is mightier than the “pshaw!”
A fun, cogent argument in favor of a dubious, often-damned art.Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-592-40623-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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