Fresh from a sojourn as novelist (First Hubby, 1990), funny essayist Blount, Jr. (Now, Where Were We?, Not Exactly What I Had In Mind, etc.), returns to his usual modus operandi with a widely varied collection of entertainments. Blount is more pointed and trenchant than ever in this package of reportage, book reviews, poetry (O.K., Blount, we won't mention ``doggerel'' again—how's ``light verse''?), character sketches, travel writing, and, Lord help us, crossword puzzles. And it's all terrific. Despite an occasional dizzying shift in tenses, Blount's writing just gets better and better. The author rivals the Perils of Perelman in Westward, Ha! when he undertakes dog-sledding in Vermont, a safari in Africa, or assaults by piranha and by a memorable guide on a Conrad-like trip up the Amazon. There's a set piece, in true southern intonations, on how the narrator's old Mama became a famous storyteller; for those of a religious bent, there's also an exegesis on the Book of J. Then there are the folks Blount likes (Jimmy Carter and the late Gilda Radner) and the folks he doesn't (the Oval Office's incumbent and his predecessor, as well as malefactors of great wealth). Find out more than anyone ought to know about coon-dog hunting competitions and synchronized swimming meets (in which the girls offer such aquatic show-stoppers as Blitzkrieg-1939 or Rosh Chodesh-Israelean Festival). In a dozen crosswords, Blount explodes words and reassembles them to ``create advanced, antiestablishment, biodegradable crossword puzzles for gain.'' ``The public,'' he says, ``knows what it wants—something dumb—and it isn't easily fooled.'' Yet he may just be the writer to do the fooling; here's a text that's just clever and giddy enough. Comedy may indeed be hard for the moribund, as the old show- biz chestnut has it. But Blount, showman that he is, sure makes it look a lot easier than either dying or camels. All in all, some hard-shell writing talent.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-679-40053-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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