This unconventional memoir, as life-affirming as it is hip, shows and tells all about the author's self-published, Xeroxed magazine, which helped her survive and flourish during her postcollegiate years. After completing Johns Hopkins University's graduate writing program, cultural critic and fiction writer Kennedy (Stripping and Other Stories, 1994, etc.) was highly ambitious but creatively frozen. So instead of competing to be a ``famous young writer'' in New York, she decided to move to the Boston area and make herself a star, and while she was at it ``trick people into liking me . . . get dates. . . and transform my boring life into an epic story.'' Thus her 'zine (called ``Pagan's Head'') was born. Distributed to friends and acquaintances, and using a mix of text, cartoons, and clip art, it featured tributes to childhood pals, reflections on the Nixon era, paeans to platform shoes, thrift stores, and the Partridge Family, and her crushes on Friedrich Nietzsche and Henry Adams. And it worked, Kennedy says; she became ``the 'zine queen of Boston.'' Each of the eight issues is reprinted here, accompanied by essays about the making of ``Pagan's Head.'' Here she explores the contrast between the bold and witty public persona she created and her ``real-life-Pagan'' self, a semi-insecure, brainy woman who discusses seriously such matters as her dad's death from cancer, the Gulf War, her ovarian tumor, and her ancestors' slave-owning past. But eventually, with the help of her 'zine and the self- discovery that follows, she pools her resources and becomes the unified, present Pagan. Kennedy's delightful chronicle is enough to make you want to pick up a pen and start your own personal fanzine or put on some platforms and dance in the streets.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13628-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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
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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