A journalistic feast best savored in small bites over several days.
The quirky follow-up to the author/illustrator duo’s PscyhoGeography (2007).
Journalist and novelist Self (The Butt, 2008, etc.), who wrote a weekly column called “PsychoGeography” for the Independent, presents his second collection of those pieces with his friend and illustrator Steadman (Garibaldi’s Biscuits, 2009, etc.), whose pictures do far more than illustrate—they amuse, illuminate, amplify and, at times, almost editorialize on Self’s text. His rendering of an unhappy Self scrunched in a tiny airplane seat alongside two toothy snarling companions is typically boisterous. Self loves to walk, knowing, like some sort of 19th-century Transcendentalist, that truths lie along roads rarely taken—and he often finds them. The collection commences with the longest and strongest piece. “Walking to the World” is a tribute to the author’s longtime idol, the late sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard, whose life Self decided to honor by walking from Ballard’s home in Shepperton to Heathrow Airport, flying to Dubai City, walking from its airport to “The World,” Dubai’s collection of 300-artificial islands designed to look like the countries of the world, where the author planned to walk the length of its Britain. Nothing quite worked out as anticipated, but his keen eye misses little. The other literary snapshots vary in quality and humor and offer some evidence why a collection of so many pieces has its risks—for example, the author uses the word “Brobdingnagian” in at least four different essays and repeats himself in other ways as well. But Self crafts countless striking, buoyant phrases and/or sentences (“Wasps swarm on the lumps of chicken and beef we’ve left for them, then, too obese to sting, they blade-hop back to their subterranean nest in the rockery by the pool”). The author also includes pieces about the homeless of Los Angeles, American crayfish conquering the Thames, Baghdad’s Green Zone and “cardinism,” a kind of sexual relief provided by converting an old castle into a modern home.
A journalistic feast best savored in small bites over several days.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-022-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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