A can’t-miss comedic performer delivers a mediocre book.
The comedian’s twisted views on spirituality.
Politics, his family and his neuroses used to be the meat and potatoes of Black’s stand-up act, but lately he’s been increasingly focused on religion. Thus it should come as no surprise to his ever-increasing fan base that the follow-up to his bestselling—and quite funny—debut, Nothing’s Sacred (2005), compiles 42 essays riffing on everything from praying on airplanes to suicide bombers. Unlike his always-solid stage routine, however, the proceedings here are hit-or-miss. Looking at his words on the printed page, readers will realize how important Black’s enraged delivery is to his act. The book certainly has its moments. “The God Lists: God the Father/God the Bother” (one list for each) features Black at his blackest: Among the 23 reasons he doesn’t believe in God, we find beets, Nazis, herpes and American Idol. But such spot-on moments are few and far between. The book’s worst transgression is the inclusion of the script from a critically lambasted play performed in 1981 by Black and fellow Yale Drama grad Mark Linn-Baker (better known from TV’s Perfect Strangers). “I know it’s strange to go into a play at this point,” acknowledges the author, who was a playwright for years before The Daily Show made him famous, “but it is truly the best way to conclude this book. Or maybe it isn’t. I really don’t know.” Black is a brilliant performer and a biting social commentator, but based on the evidence in this disappointing volume, he’s not much of a playwright…or a book author.
A can’t-miss comedic performer delivers a mediocre book.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-994-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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