Personable and keen-minded.
A wide-ranging journalist/author takes to the oenophile road.
“Is there anything better than drinking?” Osborne (The Poisoned Embrace, 1993, etc.) asks. “When the happiness of drinking overwhelms you, you cannot resist it.” But Osborne felt terribly self-conscious about drinking wine, wondering whether his choices were the promptings of others or the authentic response of his tongue to something good. Wanting to feel comfortable with his likes and dislikes, to breathe free of the floodtide of wine opinion, off he went to California, France, and Italy to educate himself. That meant, in measure, coming to know himself, as well as something about what the winemaker was after. He had to dig into the notions of taste and the realities of terroir, into hugeness versus finesse, into the usable nuggets of prejudiced wisdom from the wine police threshed from the ego and dross. By temperament, Osborne is drawn to the stranger byways and backrooms of winemaking; he’s not about to pass up a sampling from Angelo Gaja or lunch with Robert Mondavi (though both had him sweating his self-confidence), but he’s happier in the company of California garagiste Bill Cadman, a man of “dark forces, mistakes, passions, and truculent convictions,” or bad-boy alchemist Randall Grahm. Like Kermit Lynch and Simon Loftus, Osborne is looking for a connection between grape, place, and himself, a trifecta that, with growing exposure to ideas, intentions, and product, he hits more often than he would at the racetrack. His prose has a pleasing, gentle flow, with eddies of humor and yeastiness; Osborne displays a hungry mind, and a gift for taking in the landscape even if he dislikes the wine: “a distant field of mustard switching off for the night,” or “cypresses stabbing into the dark blue air . . . silhouettes of umbrella pines along the hills.” He takes the showboats down a peg, but he isn’t a self-conscious iconoclast, just an odd fellow looking for a mouthful of happiness.
Personable and keen-minded.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-86547-633-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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
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
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