A dry wit and surprising pathos infuse this “family epic,” which turns out to be “merely” the telling of BÇnabou’s failed attempt at creating his literary masterpiece. The Moroccan-born BÇnabou’s book, at face a memoir, is, as University of Colorado professor Warren Motte says in his preface, impossible to categorize generically. BÇnabou, born in 1939, after turning away from a rabbinical calling, left Morocco for Paris, where he eventually became a professor at the University of Paris, and where, explains Motte, with his friend, the author Georges Perec, he was a member of Oulipo, or Workshop of Potential Literature, an experimentalist writers’ group. BÇnabou describes the origins of “the Book” he first planned to write as a young student in his impressions of a Morocco that “stuck” to his memory —as if the bonds that attached me to that land had refused to break.— BÇnabou had come to feel that Moroccan Judaism was misunderstood, a centuries-old world whose people, adventures, and accomplishments were unknown, unremembered. Hardly surprising, in the idea of a book, a family, and ethnographic history, he saw a path before him. But an endearing madness is revealed in BÇnabou’s self-consuming obsession with method and materials. The reader shares his initial hopefulness as he details his younger self’s ambitious plans for a family epic, founded in memory, supplemented by ever-growing mountains of scholarly documentation, what BÇnabou calls “Resources,” and formally grounded in a literary model of the past that, ultimately, eludes him. In telling the stories of his three selected ancestors, Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun, BÇnabou realized he was caught up in a process that had no reason to end. Eventually, the book seemed less and less important. Years having passed, BÇnabou notices that his youthful project has not disappeared. He’s decided to let his book tell itself; he’ll merely hitch himself to the story and go along for the ride in this artistic tour-de-force, by turns playful and serious.
Pub Date: April 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-8032-1285-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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