Like last year's Mary and the Giant, yet another haunting mainstream novel unpublished during Dick's lifetime. Once again, the setting is California during the 50's. The protagonist is popular San Francisco disc jockey Jim Briskin, who does everything from rock to classical on station KOIF, but gets sick and tired of announcing inane commercials for Looney Luke's Used Cars, says so on the air, and is given a one-month suspension by his irate boss. Jim then begins trying to woo back his lovely, alcoholic ex-wife Pat Grayson, who had divorced him when she found out he was sterile, and is now engaged to the shallow station manager at KOIF. Except that meanwhile Pat has gotten drunk and seduced poor Art Emmanuel—a teen-ager with a pregnant teen-age wife (both of them are fans of Jim's)—who refuses to stop at a one-night stand, blackening Pat's eye when she wants to back out of the relationship. By the time Jim rescues her from a motel on the outskirts of town, Pat is a suicidal wreck. Hovering around the edges of this mainstream plot—a kind of Dickian joke—is a weird group of kids, members of a science fiction-fan club called The Beings from Earth, who have hooked up with a truly weird paranoid named Ludwig Grimmelman, who wants to cleanse the world with fire and violence. Dick is never quite able to bring the two plots together; Grimmelman and his charges merely fade out of the action. But Pat and Jim's bittersweet reconciliation—a story of epic forgiveness—makes for a dramatic and even suspenseful close. Basically a love story, then—quirky, alternately hopeful and bleak, sad and funny, quintessentially Philip K. Dick—with a less successful stab at social issues like juvenile deliquency, teen-age pregnancy, and the like.
Pub Date: July 20, 1988
ISBN: 0586090665
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Arbor House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1988
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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