Fans of Handler’s outrageous persona will find much to enjoy; the unconverted will remain so.
Further globe-trotting adventures of the scandalous talk show host.
TV host and author Handler (Lies that Chelsea Handler Told Me, 2011, etc.) returns with another chronicle of bad behavior, this time focusing on her various fabulous vacations to such exotic destinations as Africa and Switzerland. Her shtick remains intact: an unapologetic stream of calculated outrageousness, including casual near-racism, abuse heaped on friends and family, overindulgence in various intoxicating substances, sexual frankness and scatological misadventure (“Mixing Metamucil with vodka will be successful in helping you go to the bathroom, but your timing should be strategic if staying with a friend. Once you clog someone’s toilet, they have a hard time remembering anything about you other than you clogging their toilet”). The results are fitfully funny, though the author’s grotesque sense of privilege and entitlement begins to grate; though this tone is certainly also part of Handler’s highly polished comic persona, readers not blessed with the TV star’s wealth and coterie of pampering enablers may begin to resent her petty complaints and blithe disregard for consequences. The bulk of the narrative concerns Handler’s safari expedition in Africa, and the author’s observations, when not actively offensive, are amusing. Handler is particularly adept at realizing her characters: Her traveling companions, safari guides and resort staffers emerge vividly drawn, and her ear for distinctive and telling dialogue is well-honed. She is less successful maintaining interest when going on about her dogs, a common pitfall of overly involved pet owners. The highlights of the book are a riotously funny set piece in which our heroine evacuates into her bathing suit while perilously far from appropriate restroom facilities and a reproduced email exchange between Handler and a pathetically delusional suitor. This material is by turns gross, mean and compulsively funny, which sums up the appeal of the book when Handler is on her game.
Fans of Handler’s outrageous persona will find much to enjoy; the unconverted will remain so.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9973-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: A Chelsea Handler Book/Borderline Amazing® Publishing/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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