This chronicle of freelance journalist Snowden's year in the trenches of America's work force could well serve as a textbook for Modern American Culture 101. Snowden worked as a heavy-metal roadie, an ad copywriter, a substitute math teacher, a Las Vegas cocktail waitress, a Hollywood publicist, a suburban housewife (filling in for a Connecticut matron who took two weeks off), a stripper, a rape counselor, and a molder in a chocolate factory. She gained unusual job skills, like how to sleep in her clothes as a roadie to avoid having to change on a bus; how to mask her limited knowledge of algebra by teaching students the intricacies of restaurant tipping instead; and how to achieve the best hair removal on her bikini line. Beyond these tidbits, Snowden found occupational microcultures with rigid dress codes, rituals, traditions, and hierarchies all their own. With an amateur anthropologist's eye and a large measure of good humor, Snowden confirms and contradicts stereotypes of life in America's offices, casinos, factories, and suburbia. Her fellow ad writers did dream up their toothpaste ads playing Nerf basketball, just like on thirtysomething; playing mom—which each week included doing nine loads of laundry and buying 13 gallons of milk and orange juice, though she was exempt from marital-bed duties—was by far the hardest job, since it had no quitting time. But who would have thought that heavy-metal roadies golf or bowl on their days off or that cocktail waitresses in Las Vegas must join a union, be tested for TB, take an alcohol management class, and have 60 strands of hair cut from their head for DNA testing? While Snowden presents vivid portraits of her jobs, it is not until the epilogue that she explains how she got them, and the absence of any overall conclusions about the American workplace is a drawback. This testament to how deeply jobs shape workers' lives is as invaluable a cultural document as Susan Orleans's Saturday Night. (Photos, not seen) (First serial to Esquire)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03673-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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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