Good-natured fast food from the doyenne of gossip columnists. Goes well with a cold Dr. Pepper or a slug of Booker’s.
The venerable gossip columnist talks and eats her way through a memoir that recalls great comestibles shared with the gliterati of half a century.
Liz Smith, a Fort Worth girl brought up on chicken fried steak, jailhouse chili and watermelon, must have been the advance guard of the Texan assault on the bluest state when she arrived in Manhattan in 1949. Her open good nature—and her access to print—gave her the opportunity to sup with the powerful, dine with the stars, nosh with Social Register swells and spend considerable time at the trough with assorted biggies. She describes the oysters, pastries, deep fries and high teas that nourished her at Le Cirque, Elaine’s and intimate dinner parties on the Vineyard or overlooking the East River. Here’s pal Liz Taylor in ravenous mode. Here’s Erica Jong, Henri Soulé and Elaine Strich. Nora Ephron takes over a few pages. Don’t forget Mr. Forbes and “Malcolm’s calm and friendly natives on his island.” Names drop like lard on a hot skillet. M. Proust (one personage Liz didn’t seem to encounter) evoked the past by remembering a sponge cake, but Proust never gave a recipe. Our memoirist provides many. A choice ingredient that dieters should know: bacon drippings. There’s instruction in the art of the eulogy, and there’s an etiquette class for children, both, like all else, a guileless stream of consciousness ornamented with aphorisms from W.S. Gilbert and Ogden Nash and sprinkled overall with oddball footnotes, like raisins. Smith maintains a sweet penchant for the inane. It might be noted that Richard Wilbur, not Sondheim, holds the copyright for the lyric “glitter and be gay,” but only a grouch would demand accuracy in such a confection. Just pass the Tums, please.
Good-natured fast food from the doyenne of gossip columnists. Goes well with a cold Dr. Pepper or a slug of Booker’s.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5156-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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