From Pulitzer-winning novelist Kennedy (Very Old Bones, 1992, etc.), over 80 articles, reviews, interviews, and miscellaneous pieces—``a chorale of my own assumed voices.'' Before, during, and after halting (but ultimately successful) attempts to find his fictional voice, Kennedy plowed the fields of nonfiction as a reporter, book critic, and pop-culture fan. These pieces have been culled from nearly 40 years of this work, ranging from a 1954 tongue-in-cheek obit of Langford, a ``Widely Known Albany Cat,'' to a 1992 tribute to childhood idol Damon Runyon. The quality here ranges as widely as the time span. A few segments might have been better left out (notably those dealing with his wife's hiccups and Diane Sawyer's blond beauty); and the early journalism, though highly competent, bears marks of being written on the fly and lacks the lyricism that makes Kennedy's ``Albany cycle'' of novels soar. Meanwhile, the literary reviews and interviews reveal the author's heroes and mentors (Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren, John O'Hara, and E.L. Doctorow), as well as his fascination with Latin American writers (an interview with Gabriel Garc°a M†rquez became the first biographical report on the writer in both the US and Britain). Appreciations of Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, and jazz pianist Joey Bolden are warm and charming fan's notes but seldom incisive. Aficionados will be most interested in Kennedy's accounts of his first stab at short-story writing; of his relatives (including an uncle who served as a partial model for Francis Phelan); Ironweed's astonishing rejection by 13 publishers; two brief encounters with Hollywood as a screenwriter; and, of course, the hardscrabble, raffish Irish-Catholic Albany milieu that the author has re-created as lovingly as Joyce's Dublin or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Not Kennedy in his best, heart-stirring fictional mode—but often funny, charming, and certainly indicative of the subterranean personal and literary roots that bore glorious fruit in his novels.
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-670-84211-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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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