Don’t read this unless you’re prepared to be saddened, encouraged, and changed.
A lyrical trip from the glitz of theater to the darkest corners of the American justice system.
When Erik and Jessica met, they didn’t know that they’d date, marry, and write an acclaimed play together. But they did, and now they’re here to tell us the story behind the story. Social-activist Jessica dragged Erik to a conference on the death penalty, and both were riveted and horrified by learning about people put on death row for crimes they didn’t commit. They left the conference determined to write a play about the wrongly convicted, and so they traveled the country, interviewing dozens of former death row inmates. The play they ultimately produced about six of those people, The Exonerated, ran on Broadway to much acclaim (Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins were in the cast). It toured the country and was seen by Supreme Court justices and by Illinois Governor George Ryan, who subsequently commuted the sentences of all 167 prisoners on Illinois’s death row. Central to the present book are the authors’ descriptions of their travels, including their interviews with Dale Johnston, who’d been wrongly convicted of killing his stepdaughter and her boyfriend, and Clarence Brandley, an exonerated man in that belly of the beast, Texas. Blank and Jensen weave the story of their own relationship, up to and including their honeymoon, into the account, but romance is decidedly a subplot; there’s just enough information so you don’t feel cheated by a coy, withholding memoirist, yet the love story never detracts from the real one, while the behind-the-scenes look at getting a play produced is a delightful bonus. To boot, the two are wonderful writers, able to avoid the tics that can mar duo-first-person accounts—there’s no “I (Jessica) did such-and-such”—and the prose is funny and crisp. Indeed, the recounting of the play is every bit as affecting as the play itself.
Don’t read this unless you’re prepared to be saddened, encouraged, and changed.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-8345-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
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
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