The elegance, originality, and humor of Sante's new book provide a deeply satisfying reading experience. When he was a young child, Sante (Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, 1991, etc.) and his Belgian parents immigrated to the US, settling in New Jersey. Not quite American and not quite Belgian, Sante was more of ``an international co-production.'' Belgian culture, while at the center of his family life, was inherited in fragments. The Factory of Facts is Sante's strikingly original attempt to make sense of these fragments—of himself, his family, and his native country. The 15 chapters don't follow a linear progression, but rather bear Sante's characteristic stamp of a roving and all-embracing curiosity. Fortunately, he has the stylistic genius and temperament to make a cohesive whole of his wide-ranging discourses on everything from Belgian labor history to America in the 1960s. This volume is the very embodiment of Sante's definition of the past as ``a notional construct, a hypothesis, a poem.'' Sante is less interested in his life in the US than in his half-remembered early childhood in Belgium. The bulk of his memoir is a running commentary on the Sante family, his native city of Verviers and its collapsed textile industry, and, above all, the particularities of Belgian culture. Verviers looms large in his reconstruction and plays the role of a character in his past; when Sante writes that he can feel the city in his bones, the reader shares his sensation. Likewise, the stubborn independence, the contradictions (linguistic and other), and the accidental nature and ambiguity of Belgium itself, all drawn with immense acumen and humor, are like Sante himself. Still, he retains an ironic distance from the past that enables him to maintain a self-conscious affection for less dispiriting times than the present. Beyond its Belgian grayness and fascinating specificity, Sante's shrewd and lyrical treatise on the past speaks to us all.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-42410-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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