From a writer now 80 years old, whose real subject whatever the topic at hand has been her own experiences of food, place, and appreciative living, comes a gathering of what she acknowledges to be her most "personal and nostalgic" pieces: the prefaces she wrote to her own books and others, complete with even more personal and nostalgic prefaces-to-the-prefaces that were composed for this edition. Read together, these layers of cordial reminiscence make up an impressionistic autobiography that glances off such encountered phenomena (and purported subjects) as Maurice Chevalier, the Gare de Lyon in Paris, or the "delicate pagentry" of Japanese cooking. (ln a twist, the burden of one preface, to The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, is how Fisher never did encounter Toklas.) Bread, wine, cities, towns, age: to Fisher, all are inextricably and candidly entwined with particular occasions, companions, childhood treats, or personal tastes. Tea? It "makes me drunk." Jane and Michael Stern's Square Meals? "I really liked their two [earlier] books better." Angelo Pelligrini's The Unprejudiced Palate? Reminds her of the time they met as wine tasters, when Pelligrini showed up enraged that he was paired with a woman, and Fisher, the first of her sex to be appointed to the panel, fretted about having to follow the custom of spitting between tastes. Friends by the end of the session, "we spat in unison into the suddenly attractive puddle of fruit juice and water we shared, and a newspaper paparazzo from Los Angeles shot our jets meeting in midair just above the bucket." Just so does Fisher memorialize the moment's bond or pleasure, in her elegant spring-water prose that is itself a considerable pleasure.
Pub Date: May 18, 1988
ISBN: 0865474141
Page Count: 218
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1988
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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