Oakland awaits a better tribute.
Lackluster potpourri of urban history, walking tour, and cultural events from novelist and polemicist Reed (Another Day at the Front, 2003, etc.).
The city in question is Oakland, California, the author’s adopted hometown. In 1967, Reed moved from New York to L.A., gradually making his way to the Bay Area. A faculty member at Berkeley and a long-time Oakland resident, he weaves the city’s contemporary politics (he isn’t fond of current mayor Jerry Brown) with the story of its troubled founding just over 150 years ago. (The Peralta family lands, which included much of present-day Oakland, Berkeley, and surrounding areas, were taken over by US squatters whose sovereignty superseded Mexican land claims.) This works less well when the author turns to cultural events and walking tours. Describing a powwow at Oakland Technical High School, he writes, “As far as I could tell, the eagle dance involved much jerking of the head and twirling about.” On walking tours, Reed tends to simply transcribe the tour leaders’ remarks, a decision that works when the lecturer is eloquent, but leads to repetition otherwise. The Black Panther Legacy Tour would have benefited from a brief summary of the movement’s influence on and intriguing history with the city. Instead, we get a rambling (if heartfelt) monologue by founding member David Hilliard. All walks here lead back to Jerry Brown. Of the Black Cowboy parade, Reed writes, “The most polished marchers were those from the Oakland Military Academy, a pet project of the Mayor.” At a blues festival at Jack London Square, “I was standing near a fence . . . when Jerry Brown showed up. Nobody noticed him.” The news isn’t all bad, however. The author visits the Paramount, an art deco movie palace; Lake Merritt, the largest saltwater lake in the US; and the Camron-Stanford house, one of the last remaining mansions to grace Lake Merritt’s shores.
Oakland awaits a better tribute.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4540-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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