Koppel calls his diary “bread crumbs in the woods . . . marking the trail of how we got to wherever it is we are.” To anyone...
The perceptive, articulate anchor of Nightline records his observations, thoughts, annoyances, and memories in a daily journal of the closing year of the century.
Koppel (Nightline, 1996) begins, and ends, 1999 filled with hope and foreboding. He records his reaction to Clinton’s impeachment, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and shootings in American public schools, as well as his pleasures in such private moments as a family birthday celebration or the visit of a grandchild. While focusing on the present, he occasionally reminisces about his English boarding school and its stringent ways. It’s current events, however, that absorb Koppel, who examines both their significance and their coverage by the media. He ponders the changing nature of television news, the public’s much-vaunted “right to know,” the role of radio shock-jocks, and the shrinking coverage of foreign news. From time to time he takes readers behind the scenes at Nightline, going twice with his crew to the Balkans, visiting two California women’s prisons, and journeying to New Hampshire during the primary campaigns. His datelines are from his various homes (two in Maryland and one in Florida); Washington (where Nightline originates); numerous American cities (where meetings and speeches take him); Ireland (for a biking tour organized by Disney’s Michael Eisner), and cities throughout the Mideast and Greece (where he and his wife vacation). A veteran traveler, Koppel has some wry comments on airline shortcomings that will not win him friends in that industry, and his deadpan report of repeated efforts to get caller ID on his home phone won’t please phone company executives either.
Koppel calls his diary “bread crumbs in the woods . . . marking the trail of how we got to wherever it is we are.” To anyone hungry for literate, thoughtful, and thought-provoking commentary on our times, however, it is a whole satisfying loaf, crust and all.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-41077-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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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