Like the chatter at a cocktail party: fun but forgettable.
Events promoter Field summarizes soirees that only happen between the covers of a book—or when her Last Tuesday Society reproduces them in London.
Though it begins with Trimalchio’s first-century frolic from The Satyricon and closes with an excessive 2008 feast featuring endangered species from DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland, Field’s scattershot collection doesn’t otherwise progress in chronological order—or any other discernible kind of order. The final few get-togethers are fairly apocalyptic: The high school prom turns bloody in Carrie; partygoers eat the dead guest of honor in Finnegan’s Wake; and Randle McMurphy’s shindig in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest results in a lobotomy for the host, though Pierre’s hero/caterer does have second thoughts about serving up a 100-year-old Galapagos tortoise in the final entry. Field does have a format for presenting the individual parties, from The Invitation through The Guest List to The Outcome and The Legacy, but it’s mostly an excuse to make reasonably amusing wisecracks about how English writers never describe the food and condescending takedowns of writers more talented than she is. Granted, it’s hard not to giggle when Field opines that if Frodo had known that the gift he got at Uncle Bilbo’s Eleventy-First Birthday Party was the Ring of Doom, he could have saved himself “all the aggro and bother it would cause him over the next thousand pages or so.” Unfortunately, too much of the humor is on the level of this: “Plato is perhaps best remembered these days in the term ‘platonic love,’ but, as we see…he didn’t rule out a bit of rumpy-pumpy on the path to enlightenment.” Still, Field’s once-over-lightly approach will probably please undemanding folks looking for a few laughs while they obtain simple takeaways on books they’ll never read: The Brothers Karamazov, Gravity’s Rainbow and The Prose Edda are among the more daunting works digested, though Hollywood Wives adds a bit of trashy fluff.
Like the chatter at a cocktail party: fun but forgettable.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-227183-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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