This is Upton Sinclair's protest to the world signifying that he is still very much alive. One of the original muckrakers in the days of the other Roosevelt and contributing to Americana from this standpoint, Upton Sinclair tells us his story from the perspective of 83. From these pages much emerges as feebleness but those lines concern dimmed recollections of worlds past and not that of Sinclair himself. This is an intellectual's book dealing with one who made intellectual history, and no self-respecting intellectual tradesman will fail to read it. For this is the prodigious writer of hundreds of novels, plays, homilies, diatribes and pamphlets the man who discovered the Jungle in Armours Meat Industry at 28; who founded a Utopian cooperative in 1908 (where his admirer Hal Lewis took both his name and his Socialist politics and began his flight from Babbittry); and who muckraked through all America to become the finest and most devoted polemicist this country has seen. He authored a historical panorama of politics in his Lanny Budd series with as much dedication as he ran for Governor of California in his epic plan to save America in 1934. There are no characters in this autobiography, least of all himself. Nor is there insight into the great men with whom he shared his life. He fails to give us his personal story or his view of life in depth. All he has for writing tools is his propagandist's pen. And that is the way he tells it. The facts can be had from a literature class and Sinclair does not embroider. Yet this is a great man with a mediocre hand. The autobiography pulses with his greatness. The best polemicist of our time protested so well that every writer, of every shade, in America is still indebted to him for his struggle with the publishing world. This protest of life, at 83, telling many generations that Upton Sinclair is still among us, will be read more deeply than it was written.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1962
ISBN: 125811500X
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & World
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1962
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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