After one treacly tribute to the freedom of the press, the author says, “That sounds corny.” It does, and so does most of...
Reading is good for you, especially if you read what the author recommends.
Dirda, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism and a longtime editor of Washington Post Book World, has jettisoned those credentials and roared out onto the road to Dr. Phil-ville in this facile, superficial work. In some ways, it’s an old-fashioned commonplace book, lardy with lists of quotations from literary notables. In others, it’s a self-help book, full of advice about how much TV children should watch (very little), how baking sugar cookies can bring the family together during the holidays and how we should be more assiduous about flossing. Organized loosely around generic topics like education, work and leisure, love and family, the text features too much platitude and not enough attitude. Sometimes even the platitudes are questionable: the author’s reiteration of the tired complaint that publishers today favor memoirs about “bad families” is undercut by the recent publication and fond reception of his own terrific good-family memoir (An Open Book, 2003). And lists—he loves lists: of books every person should read (Robinson Crusoe, Pride and Prejudice), of great novels about education (Lucky Jim, The Centaur) and love (Possession, The Dying Animal), of classical music everyone should listen to (from Wagner to Ella Fitzgerald), of significant works of moral philosophy (from Job to Jung). Like many bibliophagists, Dirda sometimes has an excessively romantic view of the power of the page. “Books,” he writes, “by their very nature and variety, help us grow in empathy for others, in tolerance and awareness.” Of course, only certain books do that—not Mein Kampf, say, and not the suddenly ubiquitous political screeds and not the mounds of literary manure dumped in bookshops by the self-help crowd.
After one treacly tribute to the freedom of the press, the author says, “That sounds corny.” It does, and so does most of this mess.Pub Date: May 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7877-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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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