Thoughtful, though too often meandering and dry, meditations on the cultural and political response to HIV/AIDS in the US and Great Britain. Watney (Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, not reviewed) is an experienced professional in the field of HIV education and has written a monthly column on HIV/AIDS for London's Gay Times; this volume collects pieces written between 1986 and 1992. Watney critiques moralistic, homophobic responses to the epidemic, from victim-blaming to failure to acknowledge the disproportionate effect of the disease on gay men (in both the UK and the US) to unrealistic and unhelpful prescriptions of abstinence or monogamy. He argues that HIV/AIDS education must focus on ``safe sex'' and must embrace gay pride, sexual desire, and community. Watney has done academic work in cultural theory, which usefully informs his analyses of media constructions of the epidemic, especially his article on the racist implications of the press's obsession with the non-Western origins of AIDS. Unfortunately, some of his writing is weighed down by a dense, occasionally almost impenetrable writing style; his shorter pieces, most of which were first published in nonacademic gay publications, are much more readable. Watney can also be far-fetched in his theoretical flights, musing at one point that, for straight people, HIV implies a ``physical relationship with the bodies of gay men or people of color. Dread of HIV infection thus speaks an excessive fear of transgressing profound social and psychic boundaries that evidently stabilize...heterosexual identity''—hardly the soundest explanation for collective terror of a fatal disease for which there is still no known cure. Some worthy analysis, but far more jargon-ridden than the complexity of Watney's ideas merits.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8223-1553-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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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