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
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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