A deft and memorable collection with both focus and elbow room from a class act in the world of magazine journalism.
Twenty-one stylish, purposeful, wide-ranging, and carefully wrought essays, most previously published in the New Yorker.
Wilkinson begins with a sampling of short pieces, no more than a few of pages each, that take fun in tweaking celebrities and often display a certain impish charm (“My new best friend is Cash Money,” he declares in one). A few of the other, longer pieces step off the beaten path to introduce a friend of Larry King’s, profile Elmore Leonard’s researcher, or offer a glimpse into the strange world of funny cars (“a peevish and irascible species of hot rod”) and a practitioner of the sport, John Force (“Fundamental American archetypes intersected to produce the solitary, romantic, migratory, and daredevil elements of Force’s nature”). Most of the essays are serious, at times fighting for control over an unruly emotion or subject as in the two sympathetic and melancholy essays on New Yorker editor William Maxwell that were later expanded into My Mentor (2002). A crushingly poignant portrait of a boy/man with Asperger’s Syndrome stands in striking contrast to a hair-raising one of mass-murderer John Wayne Gacy (“he has said that the only crime he is guilty of was operating a cemetery without a license”) based on interviews with him in prison. As creepy in its own way, though far sadder, is an essay on suicides and suicide notes: “Life isn’t worth the bother. . . . I know I didn’t say much, but I am in a hurry,” wrote one man. In an especially puissant piece, Wilkinson explores his sense of fatherhood and the eccentricities of his child. “Throughout my son’s life,” he muses, “I have now and then thought of him as a household divinity—that is, as an uncorrupted presence of joy.”
A deft and memorable collection with both focus and elbow room from a class act in the world of magazine journalism.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-12311-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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