A worthy concept brought low by abrasive style and slapdash organization.
Feral dogs have their day in this overextended exploration of East St. Louis and its #1 Dog Lover.
News flash: packs of wild dogs are roaming America’s inner cities. Journalist Roth discovered this fact while profiling local fixture Randy Grim for the St. Louis Riverfront Times. Driving a beat-up VW bus, maniacally devoted to the unclaimed canines, and possessed of a catalogue of germ phobias that prevents him from eating at buffets or touching escalator handrails, Grim surely seemed a likely subject for a newspaper profile. But Roth has stretched what could have been an engaging feature essay into something that can’t quite hold its own weight. She begins well enough, if melodramatically, taking the reader along with Grim as he prowls abandoned lots on a snowy night. He pounds up staircases and slips on the ice while an uncomprehending animal attempts to escape its hunter, who illustrates all the while the qualities needed (patience, fearlessness) for a job nobody wants. Grim then recalls his first rescue (which landed him with 13 puppies needing to be fed with an eyedropper every two hours for weeks) and the effect of his new obsession on family and friends. With trademark newspaper prose—the sentence fragment, the one-sentence paragraph, the particular affection for “gray” as a descriptor—Roth clatters her way through Grim’s stalking of one particular pack and his efforts to publicize the plight of the abandoned animals. Along the way, she drops in lessons on the likely evolution of domesticated dogs, the prevalence of dog-fighting, the formation of pack mentality, and the thought processes of wild and domesticated dogs.
A worthy concept brought low by abrasive style and slapdash organization.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28397-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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