Absolutely wonderful. Read it to your dog.
Bubbling Pinkwater (The Afterlife Diet, 1995, etc.), NPR humorist and children’s author, tail-wags over the dogs in his life and draws their pictures.
Pinkwater is not Jack London, his white fang baring the call of the wild, although Pinkwater’s father believes that Daniel’s Uncle Boris was talked into trekking from Warsaw across Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, and China to catch a boat to Alyeska and the Yukon, by none other than London himself, a Pole who lived over his father’s tailor shop with an angry wife and three children. In the Yukon, Uncle Boris went prospecting with a team of Malamutes, whose leader, Jake, spoke perfect Polish: “Ir zeit zaier gut-hartsik” (“You are very kind”). When Pinkwater’s father emigrated from Warzawa to Manhattan in 1920 (and hence to Memphis), where he rose from the depths to the lower depths as a ragpicker, Uncle Boris, who sold a black chow-chow to Freud and had a photo to prove it, moved into the Memphis apartment and gave the house the gift of a Pekingnese called Bobby, who saved Danny from being eaten. “During that vulnerable period in which I was not dissimilar to a meat loaf, he lurked under my crib, growled, and challenged anyone who came near me. . . . ” Skip many years and Daniel’s married to Jill in Hoboken and buying Juno, a Malamute puppy. “Dogs are yuppies. They have the corporate mentality. They will climb up your body to get to the top. This is all dogs.” As Juno grows, he pushes Jill out of bed at night and Daniel awakes to a grotesquely grinning face, gazing lovingly on him. Later, his Inuit Lulu’s litters become holy terrors, with the prettiest and brightest puppy ready to eat his mother’s liver. But Maxine, the house Labrador, an insanely maternal control freak, straightens out the disobedient pup and gives her what moral qualities she may have.
Absolutely wonderful. Read it to your dog.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85632-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
