A mainstay of the New Yorker staff since 1939, Hamburger has written everything from —Talk of the Town— entries to casuals and profiles; he even served as music critic and movie reviewer. Dozens of pieces are collected here, arranged chronologically within each category. The few comments provided by Hamburger are helpful: A “Stanley” essay was written, for example, to explore “small, little-known islands in the East River and New York Harbor,” and was authored by none other than the self-styled —Our Man Stanley.— Much of the material is dated; some of Hamburger’s observations appear comically off the mark. For instance, in 1950 he became the first New Yorker writer to venture into the “cultural minefield” of television. He describes the early Candid Camera TV series as “sadistic, poisonous, anti-human, and sneaky”; he dismisses Frank Sinatra and his singing on the October 1951 debut of his show as being either “asleep or else . . . quite ill.” Hamburger fared a bit better as an —amateur” music critic in the late 1940s, although Toscanini demanded that he be fired. Hamburger wrote many fine profiles over the years, with the best a 1986 piece on Vartan Gregorian. His parodic profile of then-popular J.P. Marquand may be lost on many readers today. A 1944 profile of Louie the Waiter at the Sixth Avenue Delicatessen—a man noted not only for his service-oriented doggerel, but for selling $4 million worth of war bonds—is a prime example of New Yorker writing at its finest. Uneven, but what writer’s 60-year output wouldn’t be? There’s great stuff here, representative of a kind of writing and reportage that, sadly, is passing.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-43883-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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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