A powerful work of reporting and punditry.
Spurlock, the man behind the hit documentary Super Size Me, again savages the fast-food industry.
If you saw the film, you know that Spurlock undertook an experiment: eating only McDonald’s food for one month. Here, he translates his critique from film to book, and the result is, if possible, even more disturbing than the film. America is fatter than ever, and unhealthier than ever, and a good chunk of the blame lies with the fast-food industry. The statistics Spurlock marshals are stomach-turning: Americans spend $124 billion a year on fast food, and over the years, portions have increased. In 2001, 21 percent of Americans were clinically obese, up from 12 percent in 1991. This even affects airlines—our extra weight makes planes heavier, which increases fuel costs. If those stats don’t make you think twice next time you’re heading to the Golden Arches, Spurlock’s dissection of fat, sugar and, um, the fecal matter that often makes its way into beef will. We meet Matt Malmgren, who has a collection of McDonald’s burgers dating back to 1991—they sit on his bookshelves, indestructible. (Even his “dogs lose interest after the first couple of days.”) In fact, is fast food even food? Spurlock’s muckraking leads one to conclude that it’s not. Perhaps the most harrowing sections here are those about children—concerning the rise in obesity and decline in exercise in juvenile populations, the attendant health problems, and the despicable complicity of public school cafeterias and vending machines in fattening up our kids. Ultimately, Spurlock questions not only the fast-food industry but consumerism in general and a society whose people have time neither to shop for food nor to cook. Spurlock delivers all of this in his trademark take-no-prisoners style and with a humor that saves him from sounding pious or self-satisfied.
A powerful work of reporting and punditry.Pub Date: May 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-25360-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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