Intermittently funny but ultimately a frustrating missed opportunity.
In this debut work of nonfiction, Webb leaves his performance stage to examine “general expectations of manhood” and tell the stories that have made his life interesting.
This is more than a straightforward memoir, as the author delves into a variety of sociological issues, primarily those related to conceptions of manhood. “Often,” he writes, “when we tell a boy to ‘act like a man,’ we’re effectively saying, ‘Stop expressing those feelings.’ And if the boy hears that often enough, it actually starts to sound uncannily like, ‘Stop feeling those feelings.’ ” Throughout the book, Webb explores the different ways in which masculinity is perceived and enforced in culture, and he attempts to illustrate what happens when masculinity is challenged by a male himself. “The great thing about refusing to feel feelings is that, once you’ve denied them, you don’t have to take responsibility for them,” he writes. “Your feelings will be someone else’s problem—your mother’s problem, your girlfriend’s problem, your wife’s problem.” In trying to understand the consequences of a regimented male experience, Webb falls into consistent heteronormativity. It’s unfortunate that in a work focusing so incisively on understanding the male experience, the spectrum of masculinity is misrepresented. Interspersed through the comedy and memoir are rather myopic explanations of what boys, teenagers, and men are expected to do in society—e.g., not cry, not be a teacher’s pet, play sports, have lots of sex. While intended to be humorous, these categorizations will feel exasperating for many readers. But Webb stays true to his comedic self and provides comic relief amid situations of adolescent torpor: “I’m very proud of the fine sprinkling of pubic hairs I’ve managed to grow, although that area in general looks like the head of a ninety-year-old woman recently returned from a perm too many at the hairdresser’s.”
Intermittently funny but ultimately a frustrating missed opportunity.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78689-008-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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