In Much Depends on Dinner (1987), Visser drew on domestic and natural history, cultural anthropology, and personal observation for a fluent, free-ranging, item-by-item discussion of the separate foods (chicken, salt, ice cream, etc.) assembled for a hypothetical simple company dinner. Here, she applies the same comparative cultural and historical approach to dining etiquette and customs. Visser offers the same mix of scattered facts from other times and cultures and wry references to ``our own'' common practices; quotations from Erasmus, Barthes, Miss Manners, and many more; and, now and then, amusing anecdotes. The result is another feast for trivia-blotters with a taste for class. You can turn to any page and pull out plums on, say, the sequence of courses (the ``plot of the meal'') here, there, and then; the mode of gathering for feasts or family dinners in Africa, Papua New Guinea, ancient Greece, or ``our own'' dining rooms; or the use of alcohol by the Iteso of Kenya and Uganda or the Newars of Katmandu. And who would not be diverted by the news that the Last Supper, famous paintings notwithstanding, was a reclining meal; that the English until the 19th century kept chamber pots for guests' convenience in or just outside their dining rooms; or that Emily Post in 1922 advised hosts unable to provide wine to set out wineglasses anyway and ``pour something pinkish or yellowish into them''? Still, without the earlier book's more substantial subject matter, it is even easier to become numbed by the sheer miscellaneous meandering: the amassing of items without argument or direction; the repetition of much familiar secondary material; the belaboring explanation of what we already know or easily understand. And isn't it past the time when merely pointing out the status connotations of everyday practices, without pressing on to any stimulating insights, is considered perceptive wit?
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1116-5
Page Count: 455
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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