Witty and entertaining.
Humorous collection of autobiographical essays from a single, 20-something woman in New York City.
Crosley begins by reminiscing about the peculiarities of her parents and sister, and the childhood influences that amused and obsessed her. One piece riffs on the now-defunct computer game Oregon Trail, which provided “the illusion I was actually going somewhere.” At age 12, little did she know that she would become a well-connected book publicist in New York. Much of the material concerns haphazard encounters from her early adult years. She appears to have made an indelible impression on her many close friends and acquaintances, as demonstrated when a former high-school classmate phoned seemingly out of the blue to ask Crosley to be her maid of honor. This is exactly the sort of awkwardly one-sided intimacy that the author stumbles upon, gets tangled in and then, with an inward grimace and external graciousness, attempts to make the best of. One of the strongest and funniest essays tracks her tenure as an assistant to a woman with whom she definitely did not get along. Their antagonistic relationship deteriorated into stony silence after Crosley baked a cookie in her boss’s likeness and presented it at the office. “Sometimes, when you do something so marvelously idiotic,” she writes, “it’s hard to retrace your thought process using the functional logic now available to you.” Another, about her move from one Manhattan apartment to another, tells of the day she managed to lock herself out of both. In Crosley’s version of adulthood, her gravest responsibility is to protect and revel in her own happiness and well-being. Her essays display the same exacting attention to detail as those of David Sedaris and an exuberance similar to Beth Lisick’s, along with a self-deprecating slant and appealing modesty all her own: “Should I get killed during the day…back in the apartment I never should have left, the bed has gone unmade and the dishes unwashed.”
Witty and entertaining.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-306-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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