Despite the book’s shortcomings, most readers will be disappointed to reach the final page.
A Tony Award–winning playwright turns his hand to humorous nonfiction in this generally disarming, self-mocking collection of essays on matters personal and cultural.
From its cheeky title to the arresting bons mots sprinkled throughout, the book is a breezy read that cloaks some penetrating truths in occasionally flippant, mildly corrosive remarks. Some pieces are just writerly doodling with little to commend them. Greenberg, who has written two dozen plays and styles himself an urban recluse, believes that when one spends an inordinate amount of time inside, one's perceptions when out of doors are sharpened (a dubious notion). He addresses many of the more vexing questions of modern life with tongue planted firmly in cheek, and at his best, he is both wryly funny or scathing, especially regarding our propensity to mistake talking about an injustice for actually doing something about it. Greenberg sometimes gets serious, as in his observation about the rocky shoals of political correctness. “The language of cultural transit,” he writes, “is tricky and constantly mutating and one can be embraced and then shunned for the very same gesture.” Among many other subjects, he weighs in on the unexpected pleasures of achieving an aim by telling the truth, on the divide between judgment and opinion, on self-congratulatory literary criticism, on the scarcity of unretouched beauty, and on the absurdity of dismissing exceptional work solely because its practitioner may be disagreeable. Mixed in are appreciations of Greenberg's more colorful friends, among them the late actress Jill Clayburgh. Reminiscent of David Eagleman's Sum (2009), in tone if not in content, the shorter essays can be mere fragments of a page. Irresistible “hooks” sometimes compete with padding, and toward the end, the author gets a bit showy with his vocabulary.
Despite the book’s shortcomings, most readers will be disappointed to reach the final page.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-57652-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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