Twenty-nine high-wire acts that prove Elkin (The MacGuffin, 1991; The Rabbi of Lud, 1987, etc.) one of our zaniest acrobats of the acerb since Perelman. Elkin wrote these pieces over the past ten years or so, as personal reminiscences or as introductions to his own reprint volumes or to story collections by others. As ever, one stands in the blast as Elkin goes into meltdown. For Elkin to be with it, his muse must be in wordgasm, or so he apparently thinks ("Like some human beast, [the flamenco dancer] seems to rise from the broad, tiered flounces of her costume as from a package of waves at a shoreline, the great, fabric petals of her long train swirled, heaped as seawater at her feet..."). Some readers, however, will bless him when he relaxes and a story or linear subject forms on the nova. At his best, as in "My Middle Age" and "My Father's Life," he's personal, even heartfelt: "The forties were my father's decade. He looked like a man of the forties. The shaped fedora and the fresh haircut, shined shoes...His soft silver hair, gray since his twenties; the dark, carefully trimmed mustache; the widow's peak; the long, patrician features; his good cheekbones like drawn swords. The vague rakishness of his face like a kind of wink." Elkin is absorbing when bemused by the needs of fiction, telling us about plot, scholarship, the writing craft, and how his short stories came to be, or when taking jabs at his multiple sclerosis. He strikes strong notes of homecoming when meeting the current owner of the Johnson-Smith novelty company (whose ads appear in the back of comic books), and truly tings bells when describing his lust for bars of soap from hotels around the world (he has five or six thousand bars). Bed-table sedative that amuses with hairpin turns and arabesques.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0671797859
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
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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