A Frenchman’s overly academic look at television that will likely leave most American readers cold. Bourdieu’s principal thrust in these collected lectures (presented on French television—thus the pun in the book’s title) is the presentation of journalism on television. He notes correctly that French (and American) television is flawed by its inability to move outside the mainstream in seeking perspectives. It’s always the same “talking heads” who appear on talk shows to discuss hot topics, and more often than not, people with “differing” points of view are actually good friends. As a result, little or nothing new is ever presented or learned about subjects that may affect large portions of the population. Bourdieu similarly attacks sensationalism in journalism, noting that it appeals to the baser instincts in the population. He uses the example of the murder of a French child and its representation in the local media and shows how members of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s neo-fascist National Front eventually ended getting caught up in the subsequent calls for vigilante justice. While all of this discourse is interesting and pertinent, it gets lost easily in the postmodernist vocabulary that Bourdieu uses to discuss his topic. Furthermore, the literary and sociological references that Bourdieu uses to support his argument will be completely lost on readers who aren—t well schooled in the disciplines of either literature or sociology. And because his references are almost overwhelmingly French, the non-French reader will likely also feel at a loss. Translator Ferguson attempts to rectify this obvious failure in cultural transmission with a brief note at the end of the text, but by the time the reader reaches the end, the damage caused by such confusion is already done. Bourdieu’s work is thus of interest only to the serious scholar of sociology or postmodern cultural criticism, not to the reader looking for a broad, lucid study of the problems of television.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56584-407-6
Page Count: 112
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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
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
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