From someplace called Minnesota comes a Nelson funnier than Ozzie, Ricky, Lord or Half. Nimble foolery packed in minipieces.
The author of Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese (not reviewed) and quondam host of Comedy Central’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 offers some small, comic essays. The result is, happily, laughable.
In nearly 60 short pieces, Nelson covers the traditional bases required of funny authors and easily gains admission to the Professional Droll Writers' Union. He deals nicely with such facetious topics as the arts, outdoor life (with animals), indoor life (with relatives), recalled youth, food, human anatomy, coping with life, and general introspection. He has difficulties, like Great-Grandfather Leacock, in diverse everyday settings. He delivers a generic business speech that could easily precede Grandpa Benchley's immortal Treasurer's Report. And, like Cousin Dave Barry, he sees value in eponymous book titles. The good old subjects of pique include hotel stays and semi-amateur theatricals. Other, more modern, takes cover cell-phone shouters, big-box stores, and performance art (semi-amateur theatricals). Nelson reveals that he's for flesh-based food. He asserts, in another thoughtful think piece, that the heyday of the buttock is past. Especially neat is a thumbnail novel in the mode of Dickens, or someone very like Dickens, in which the final colloquy calls for a performance in the style of the late Stepin Fetchit or, perhaps, someone very like the late Lionel Atwill. And there's a fine little history of television that could only have been produced after some pretty shameful viewing and detailed study of many fanzines. Certainly, not all of Nelson's columns stand equally well, but the memoirs and prescriptions, the discourses and proscriptions are, on the whole, bright and easy. Take them a bit at a time and savor the once and (we pray) future world of comic writing.
From someplace called Minnesota comes a Nelson funnier than Ozzie, Ricky, Lord or Half. Nimble foolery packed in minipieces.Pub Date: March 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-093614-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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