Mailer accepts a big assignment to the American mainstream and finds himself at a loss. Emotionally and politically vacant after a fruitless mayoral campaign, his fourth marriage in decline, as he explains, he is obliged to write up the 1969 moon shot from its Houston NASA base, where he lacks opportunity for the ego interaction and participatory observation which has fueled him in the past. He tries to make up for these disabilities by playing with negations, familiar ones: the missing lunar poetry and misfired drama of science ("the real explorations were not made," e.g. "what puncture might mean in space") and of course the anticlimax of it all, lacking "some joy, some outrageous sense of adventure. . . . " Compensatory streaks of magic, death, astrology and devils are conjured up, and Mailer's confrontation as delegate from the realm of raucous sensibility with the anaemic rigors of aerospace Waspdom is played to the hilt. Even in his depressed state Mailer is too intelligent and too self-intrusive to simply camp it up. But instead of tire mock epic one might expect, he produces epic self-parody as he embroiders commonplace formulations of the significance of Apollo 11: "men . . . would certainly destroy themselves if they did not have a game of gargantuan dimensions for diversion. . . a spend-spree of resources, a sublimation, yes, the very word, a sublimation of aggressive and intolerably inhuman desires, . . ." and so forth. These musings are interspersed with reams of very straight technical description (lunar module construction, computer overload, the impossibility of using a real rendezvous radar in the simulator), plus conscientious physiognomies of the astronauts, as if Mailer in the absence of his daimon endeavored to supply at least a big book for his towering (if less, he says, than the fabled $1 million) fee. The strains show in his style: dribs of forced bawdiness, drabs of mock-Faulkner writtenness, a regrettably perseverant third-person self-reference as "Aquarius," and a staggering number of "not unlike"s, "little more than"s, "all but"s and "nearly"s. It's a factitious book and Mailer seems to know it. An excerpt appeared in Life magazine.
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1970
ISBN: 0330026100
Page Count: 429
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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