Good Women, Bad Guys would be more like it for this latest from best-selling author Hite (Women and Love, 1987, etc.), here writing with Colleran, her assistant. Far from being the ``revolutionary'' guide to choosing a good mate and establishing an egalitarian 90's relationship that the authors promise, it's a whiny, biased kvetch against the male sex in general, written in grade-B women's-mag style. By a conservative estimate, 50-60% of this book consists of excerpts from questionnaires Hite distributed to an unspecified number of women (she never explains the methodology she used to reach such eyebrow-raising conclusions as, ``Most single women over sixty-five like their lives very much''). Hite and Colleran's contributions are limited to pep talks (if you take inventory of your relationship and find it more rewarding than degrading, ``Enjoy!'' they exhort: ``We give you total permission. In fact, we insist!'') and superficial analyses in which ponderous terms like ``emotional violence'' are hefted about but never precisely defined. A man's glancing at a sporting event on TV while his woman is pressing for a discussion of feelings seems to rank right up there with outright mockery and revilement, on the E.V. scale. Overall, men are represented as scapegoats in every intimate failure: ``In the beginning, [a relationship] usually is happy, but as the stereotypes...gradually creep in and the woman tries to fight against them, the situation starts to deteriorate.'' The intelligent woman reader must ask, ``Aren't we beyond all this?'' (Male readers are advised to avoid this book, lest the urge to drop-kick it off a roof be taken as further evidence of their emotional violence.)
Pub Date: June 14, 1991
ISBN: 0-88184-686-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
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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