In this engaging, elegant, and enlightening study of WW II. Fussell (Class; Abroad; Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, etc.) continues the revelatory work he did in his National Book Award-winning The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). By turns amusing and shocking, Fussell's unforgivingly cleareyed vision takes in both official and uncensored ephemera—along with published accounts—to overturn the upbeat view of the war promulgated by both the government's publicity machine and the general media. Beginning with a discussion of our total unpreparedness and general incompetence—"precision" bombing often fell on our own troops; the RAF were in danger from their own frightened ground support—Fussell turns to the popular rumors, slang, stories, and humor of the troops. A chapter on "chickenshit" reveals loathsome small-mindedness endemic in the system; the chapter title "Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Too Little" nicely sums up the G.I.'s preoccupations. But Fussell is at his best as he examines the forced high-mindedness of official wartime rhetoric and the growth of "Accentuate the Positive"-toned publicity as a distinctly essential facet of modern war. Finishing with a survey of wartime literature, including Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine and the paperback publishing programs that flowered with the war, he concludes that even now "America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like. . ." Funny, upsetting, at times brilliantly illuminating.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1989
ISBN: 0195037979
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
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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