Sure to appeal to Onion fans and anyone unhappy with our current president.
A founding editor of the Onion provides a satirical guide to surviving Donald Trump’s America.
In a book that was previously published in 2016 as Trump’s America: The Complete Loser’s Guide, Dikkers and his formidable team of contributors deliver 170 pages of hilarity very much in the mold of other Onion-related books, including Our Dumb Century and Our Dumb World. Packed with photographs, infographics, vintage-looking newspaper and magazine clippings, graphs, sidebars, lists, and all the other visual elements in the Onion’s bag of tricks, the book will find plenty of laughs among the anti-Trump crowd. Dikkers and company cover all the possible attack points, taking the president to task for narcissism, misogyny, xenophobia, racism, and everything else that has made Trump such a focal point of anger and endless controversy. Chapters include “The World Community: Un-American” and “The Environment: Hippie Crap,” and the satire is relentless and consistently spot-on. Among the items “To Be Thrown Out of the White House on Day One” are “Obama’s Koran” and “any administrative assistant over 26.” Trump’s proposed citizenship exam includes such entries as, “Are you from Mexico? If yes, describes what makes you one of the good ones.” Throughout the book, Dikkers takes aim at Trump’s obsessive, ridiculous Twitter habits, with such “Top Trump Tweets” as “I will never donate blood because I made it and it’s mine” and “I’m refusing the pathetic presidential salary. Will donate every penny to breast enhancement research. #charity.” The funniest spread may be “Donald Trump’s World Map,” which shows the president’s alleged thoughts on dozens of areas around the world: India includes “smelly food” and “50 million IT guys,” while Russia features “very nice KGB friends,” and Africa is known for “birthplace of Barack Obama,” “animals that look like rugs,” and “Melania’s diamonds.” While it can be argued that most of this material preaches to the choir, it’s a damned funny sermon, just the thing to while away the time until the next outrage.
Sure to appeal to Onion fans and anyone unhappy with our current president.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7267-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2017
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
IN THE NEWS
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
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