Scholarly survey of the magazine in America since pre-Ben Franklin days, a survey Tebbel did earlier for book publishing (Between Covers, 1986). This thick text is most likely to be read by use of its index or in selected chapters rather than straight through; its story is not all that gripping, although it covers magazines preoccupied with every little thing, from floor wax to ``unidentified flying leftist objects.'' Tebbel and Zuckerman (Marketing/SUNY-Genesco) wisely concentrate on post-1918 magazines, lightly sketching in the earlier years with material drawn from Frank Luther Mott's Pulitzer Prize-winning, four-volume A History of Magazines in America (1938). Our first magazines slavishly imitated the gentlemanly British voice and publishing format, even through the Revolutionary War, but had a tough time keeping readers: Americans worked so hard they could spare leisure only for newspapers. Early magazines, however, knew their market in that ladies figured hugely as subject matter, with articles written by men idealizing or moralizing about women. Surprisingly, even before the Civil War there were ten magazines devoted to blacks. Although Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic, Scribner's, and Harper's were already long established, modern magazine publishing and marketing methods date from the birth of the Luce empire's information press with Time in 1924, followed by Luce's business magazines, including Fortune, and, his foray into photojournalism, the revered Life in 1936. A feud between Time and The New Yorker climaxed with a wicked profile of Henry Luce by Wolcott Gibbs, which sums up Luce's works: ``Where it all will end, knows God.'' Will today's mass markets break down and disappear into far more personalized, small-target magazines (already capable of light-and-sound effects at the touch of a finger), as the authors suggest in their comprehensive study? Knows God.
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-19-505127-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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