A serviceable place holder while we await more from this talented artist.
A New Yorker cartoonist gathers more than 500 of her pieces from that magazine, other publications, and Instagram.
Though she has been writing and drawing for years, Finck experienced a breakthrough of sorts with her impressively multilayered graphic memoir, Passing for Human (2018). Here, the author provides one or two simple sketches or lists per page, ranging across such sections as “Love and Dating,” “Gender Politics and Politics in General,” “Animals,” “Art & Myth-Making,” and “Time, Space, and How to Navigate Them.” As with many collections of cartoons from illustrators, comedians, or other artists, the quality here varies widely. Further culling would have been welcome (especially in the “Notes to Self” section, which many readers may skim); some of the cartoons feel rushed or even unfinished. However, when she hits, Finck is incisive in her observations of modern life—e.g., two nearly identical sketches of someone typing on their phone; one caption says “Work,” and the other says “Fun.” While Finck is certainly in line with Roz Chast when it comes to expressing anxiety and neurosis (“Can everyone else stop doing anything while I figure out what’s paralyzing me?”) in an approachable, even appealing manner, Finck is also sharp in her exposures of hypocrisy and double standards, especially when it comes to gender relations—e.g., an old man and old woman standing side by side, and the caption under the woman reads, “Too old to been seen as sexual,” while under the man, “Too old to be blamed for hitting on everyone.” Or a woman saying to a man, “I don’t want your last name. Can I have your sense of entitlement instead?” As a two-color paperback, the book should serve well as a holiday gift for fans of Chast, New Yorker cartoons, and droll humor delivered in bite-size chunks.
A serviceable place holder while we await more from this talented artist.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984801-51-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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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