Unsparing, hate-fueled diatribes serving as an implicit rebuttal of the “kill ’em with kindness” approach.
The controversial performance artist and social commentator indulges in a Trump-bashing frenzy.
Finley (The Reality Shows, 2011, etc.) finds her ultimate target in the current president. This amalgam of creative prose and freestyle poetry floods vitriol on the words and actions of Trump. Like in some of her previous works—e.g. George and Martha, her burlesque of a love affair between George Bush and Martha Stewart—the author attempts to transmogrify a bottomless liberal rage into moving, provocative, and occasionally hilarious art. Most pieces approximate Finley’s real-time experience of watching the debates, the 2016 election, Trump's inauguration and Cabinet appointments, and the seemingly endless scandals besetting American politics, and most chapters feature the author’s stream-of-consciousness conversation with herself. Other sections explore alternative narrative forms and inhabit the voices of key players, including Trump himself, pointedly sinking to his level in a satiric travesty of his political debate foibles that derails into ad hominem attacks and inverted objectifications of the male body, eventually erupting in a lively six-page roster of demeaning euphemisms for the penis (highlights include “Mighty Mouse” and “Dr. Peeper”). Recurring sections inhabit Hillary Clinton’s inner monologue and imaginatively re-create private content like the string of in-house emails (or “emales”) devoted to policing Clinton’s supposed lack of femininity and fashion sense. Finley’s signature shock value registers as rather less extreme in the present media climate, and her comedy elicits little engagement beyond a mirthless laugh at the edge of bitter despair. The poems distinguish themselves from the freestyle prose (just barely) due to their greater reliance on sound and rhythmic intonations of vengeful vituperation. One imagines these pieces playing better at a spoken word slam or a Moth performance than in print, but as with the recent retrospective of her collected works, Finley seems determined to transmit and to get on the record just how much she truly abhors this president and everything he supports.
Unsparing, hate-fueled diatribes serving as an implicit rebuttal of the “kill ’em with kindness” approach.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944869-95-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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