Epstein's (Pertinent Players, 1993, etc.) fifth collection of familiar essays, all drawn from his quarterly column in the magazine he edits (The American Scholar), maintains his high standards of honesty and amiability. Approaching sixty, this self-described old fogy strikes a cheerfully elegiac note in these admittedly solipsistic pieces. A master anecdotalist, with a talent for quotation, Epstein is a far better analyst of everyday life than he is of art. His love of Henry James, for example, comes across more powerfully in an essay on cars than it does in literary essays on the novelist. Epstein works James into all sorts of pieces here, from a celebration of cats to his vain peroration on hair. That he occasionally repeats the same tidbit might be a sign of the very old age he everywhere laments in this collection. ``An Apollonian kind of guy,'' Epstein gripes about ponytails, bell-bottoms, and suburbia. More seriously, he locates the contemporary rage for interviewing (too many Boswells and no Johnsons) in the obvious appeal to vanity and the lust for fame, to neither of which he is immune. ``Toys in My Attic'' well exhibits his love of word-play for its own sake (``What do you call a toupee? You call it, obviously, `hair apparent' ''), much as ``Merely Anecdotal'' admits his fever for the genre. His article on heroes vs. role models brilliantly decants contemporary rhetoric, and ``Decline & Blumenthal'' lumps together all sorts of legitimate gripes against our time. Signs of personal decline distress him, quite naturally; he reflects in general on the race with time and the intimations of mortality everywhere evident in his old neighborhood. The only more nostalgic piece is his touching memoir of his mother, a woman of great dignity, if no distinction. Good taste, common sense, gentle skepticism: the perfect combination for a light essayist.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03757-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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