Black Sabbath by Steven Rosen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The title track ['Paranoid'] and 'Iron Man' are probably the two songs that best represent the band: full of monolithic guitar licks, lyrical venom and that unique scream/moan unique to Ozzy - not really a musical motif in any sense of the word but dripping like an overripe plum with attitude and angst."

Well, Paranoid, Iron Man, and War Pigs are the only three Black Sabbath songs that I remember. It was almost exactly 50 years ago (the winter of 1970-1971) when I first heard Paranoid and I remember listening to the song several times a day. I am not sure if the term 'heavy metal' existed in 1970 but I swear I was thinking about Black Sabbath's music in terms of it being 'heavy' and 'hard'. Late 1960s to early 1970s was the golden era of 'heavy rock.' To me, Led Zeppelin ( Stairway To Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored ), Deep Purple, and Steamhammer (little known in the U.S.) were much better than Sabbath in the 'hard and heavy' genre. (Naturally, King Crimson was the best, but that's another story.)

Steven Rosen's Black Sabbath (with Special Guest Foreword by Ozzy Osbourne) is a readable if severely overwrought history of the band. Due to personnel changes it morphs into stories of individual band members, to finally focus on the "reality TV" show The Osbournes. Four boys, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler, and Ozzy Osbourne, "street urchins" as the author calls them, from Aston, a suburb of Birmingham, grow up in the 1960s, are involved in a series of bands, and form Black Sabbath in 1968 to explode onto world scene in 1970 with their first, eponymous album, followed by massively popular Paranoid and Master of Reality.

One of the ubiquitous themes in the first part of the novel is the juxtaposition of Sabbath and Led Zeppelin: the pairing works only with respect to the general feel of the music. Led Zeppelin had much more talented musicians while in Sabbath only Tony Iommi was a virtuoso. Another motif in the book is the purportedly 'satanic' nature of Sabbath's music. The author quotes a fragment of Nick Tosches' review in Rolling Stone (dated 4/15/1971):

"No act is too depraved, no thought too bizarre, as they plunge deeper and deeper in the realm of perversion, into the ultimate 'trip' of their own self-fashioned Hell. Orgies, incest, drugs, homosexuality, necrophilia, public nose picking, Satanism, even living sacrifice."

This is hilarious because it is 100% fake news! Sabbath used the 'satanic image' solely for commercial reasons, to sell their concerts and albums. Young adult audiences are suckers for 'depraved', 'bizarre', and 'perverted' acts. This is not to say that the band members were saintly in their behavior. The author spent some time with the band in 1974 and he reminisces with affection how the band completely thrashed a hotel room in St Louis.

In the second half of the 1970s Ozzy's alienation from the rest of the band begins and 1978 marks the end of Sabbath as it had been known. Tony Iommi remains the only permanent fixture in various personnel configurations. Until 13 July 1985 when Black Sabbath re-unites for the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia.

I will not pretend that I read the passages about the TV series The Osbournes with interest. I still cannot understand the concept of the so-called "reality show" because in my view nothing can be farther from reality than acting it out on commercial TV. Yes, I am elitist and snobbish, and proud of it. I haven't ever watched the show but the author describes it vividly as "in large part unadulterated, unfiltered profanity." Well, let me show the full degree of my wretchedness: I could do without Ozzy Osbourne and, in fact, I would like Black Sabbath much more if not for him and his antics.

I find the writing style a bit annoying: circular and repetitive: the author comes back to the same subject many times without even trying to approach it from a different point of view. The author is quite generous with bold metaphors and similes and some of the analyses - probably designed to make the text look deep and respectable - are quite far-fetched. For instance, the author claims that the roots of Black Sabbath's musical style can be traced to the "multitude of bombs that rained upon [Birmingham] during the war":

"The anger and venom and unreality of their music was a natural outgrowth of living amidst air-raid warnings, demolished buildings [...]"

Two-and-a-half-stars.

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D is for Deadbeat by Sue Grafton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"There are laws for everything except the harm families do."

What a phenomenally insightful statement in a not-that-good book! In my view, Sue Grafton's "Alphabet Series" trajectory has so far followed an oscillating path: after very good A is for Alibi came considerably weaker B is for Burglar . Then came quite good C is for Corpse and now again a weak D is for Deadbeat (1987).

A man who introduces himself as Alvin Limardo hires Kinsey Millhone to deliver a $25k check to someone who had done him a favor in a time of trouble. I can't explain it, but when I saw the name on page 3 I immediately knew the name was not real. By the way, a Google search shows that there exists a Facebook account under that name; it might though be a homage to Ms. Grafton's novel. Anyway, the story continues: the check bounces, "Alvin Limardo" turns out not to be a real name, Kinsey gets another client and the complications begin.

The plot is rather interesting but, unfortunately, the writing is mostly quite uninspired and the conversations are psychologically implausible - in some places even ridiculously so. Amateur/pop psychology abound! Even worse, the way that the plot unfolds is quite far-fetched. People tell Kinsey too much: everybody seems to be eager to share their deepest innermost secrets with her (people weren't like that before this Facebook scam began, I happen to remember). Kinsey gets a lot of information from conveniently overhearing conversations, spying through windows, etc.

Jonah Robb appears again, which provides for a sort of romantic interlude in the plot. Yet Detective Robb is mostly a convenient crutch to move the plot. Through his acquaintance Kinsey learns various facts about her case thus giving the novel a sort of procedural component. In fact, I much prefer Billy Polo thread: Ms. Grafton is able to create some implicit erotic tension between him and Kinsey, despite their implausible conversations.

I much regret the unnatural dialogues because there are some good passages in the novel:

"The ocean was silver, the surf rustling mildly like a taffeta skirt with a ruffle of white."

or my favorite, other than the epigraph:

"I'm not an outdoor person at heart. I'm always aware that under the spiritely twitter of birds, bones are being crunched and ribbons of flesh are being stripped away, all of it the work of bright-eyed creatures without feeling or conscience. I don't look to nature for comfort or serenity."

Well said! I also like the vivid and mocking account of a funeral ceremony in a fundamentalist Christian church.

I would like to pull the rating up but I am unable to: the naive pop psychology of conversations in the novel is exasperating.

Two-and-a-quarter stars.

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Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"My most persistent memory of stand-up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next."

The third autobiography of a stand-up comedy performer (after Eddie Izzard's Believe Me and George Carlin's Last Words ) that I have read very recently, Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, is another great read. Particularly for me: my job of teaching mathematics at a university has a lot in common with a stand-up performance. Math is perceived as a difficult subject by many students so teachers must often go out of their way to make their lectures captivating. I identify with almost everything that Mr. Martin writes in his autobiography about the stand-up techniques. The phrase shown in the epigraph above is particularly fitting: when I teach math I often do not think about math - this comes automatically or, perhaps, subconsciously - but instead I observe, analyze, judge, worry, and decide when and what to say next.

Of the three autobiographies Mr. Martin's is by far the best written (no wonder, he is a successful writer himself: I quite liked his novella Shopgirl ). On the other hand, it is less passionate than Mr. Carlin's book, and certainly not as bitter and cynical about human nature. Instead, it is more technical, and one might say even more scientific. Mr. Martin writes a lot about techniques of making people laugh. In one passage he quotes an observation from a psychology 'treatise' on comedy

"explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it."

He then relates how this banal observation might have led him to develop successful comedy routines that lacked punch lines. I wish he dwelled more on the technical side of the art of stand-up comedy, which to me would be more interesting than celebrity name-dropping.

Naturally, the main parts of the autobiography are dedicated to the story of Mr. Martin's career, to his growth as a performer and a comedian and his professional evolution with various emphases on different stages: verbal, visual, physical. From this entertaining and captivating account we learn about his first performances in the third grade when he was doing magic shows, through employment in Disneyland and then as an entertainer in Knott's Berry farm, to his professional breakthrough at the Boarding House club in San Francisco. Then came TV (Saturday Night Live), movies, and the peak of popularity in the late 1970s, until as Mr. Martin writes himself he "exhausted" his act in 1981.

Again, naturally, there are many hilarious passages in the book, of which I will quote two. When in college, Mr. Martin had an opportunity to interview Aaron Copland. When he and a friend arrived in the composer's house they noticed "a group of men sitting in the living room wearing only skimpy black thongs":

"[we] got in the car, never mentioning the men in skimpy black thongs, because, like trigonometry, we couldn't quite comprehend it.

Among many comedic gags the author describes I particularly like the one when he asks the audience during the performance:

"'How many people have never raised their hands before?'"

The autobiography is much richer than just the account of the author's career and remarks about techniques of stand-up comedy performance. Mr. Martin offers a moving, tender thread about his relationship with his father. It adds a deeper dimension to the text. So even if I do not totally subscribe to the "Absolutely magnificent..." blurb on the cover (courtesy of Jerry Seinfeld) I agree that it is a very good book. Strongly recommended.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.

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Hope to Die by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The double murder was more than front-page news. It was, in journalistic terms, a wonderful story. The victims, a prominent attorney and a published writer, were decent, cultured people, murdered brutally in their own home. She'd been raped, always a bonus for the tabloid reader, and subjected to a second violation [...]"

Hope To Die (2001), the fifteenth installment in the successful Matthew Scudder series by Lawrence Block, suffers from the usual malady of later novels in a series: boring familiarity of characters and repetitiveness of themes. The soap opera feel is particularly oppressive in the beginning parts of the novel and since I am strongly allergic to conceptual continuity in literature I had difficulties plodding through the pages. Well, the later parts of the novel focus more on the case rather than on Mr. Scudder, Elaine, or TJ, so I finished reading the book with some interest.

Briefly about the setup of the plot. The Hollanders, murder victims, have just come back from a classical music concert when they apparently interrupt a burglary. Coincidentally, Matthew and Elaine have attended the same concert. If this weren't enough coincidence, the victims live only about a mile away from the Scudders. There is even more: TJ, Mr. Scudder's young protégé and frequent helper, happens to know the murdered woman's niece. Naturally, Mr. Scudder is unable to avoid getting interested in the case.

The first major twist happens very early in the plot - I am not giving any spoilers - it turns out that there is much more to the originally accepted story of the murder caused by interrupted burglary. Then, about one-third into the novel Matthew Scudder offers an alternative version of the events, and to me the exposition of his theory is one of the highpoints of the book. Alas, it follows one of the lowest points, where the author begins a new thread, in the third-person narration. The thread relates thoughts, emotions, and activities of a man who is obviously in some way connected to the events. I find the parallel running of good-guys thread and bad-guy thread a particularly lame literary device, and the use of italics a horrible cliché.

While the repetitive stuff about Alcoholics Anonymous and the soap-opera passages about Mr. Scudder and his family are superficial and uninteresting I have found the two young female characters, the victims' daughter and their niece, very well written and psychologically plausible (as opposed to some of Mr. Scudder's sides of conversations with them). Despite the overall grim mood, there are some nicely humorous scenes like the passage when Elaine, annoyed at her husband's interest in a woman 40 years his junior, engages in a suitable counteraction.

To sum things up: a marginal recommendation from me, based almost entirely on the strength of the plot and ignoring the weaknesses of character portrayal. Very, very far apart in quality from, say, the same author's The Sins of the Fathers Yet for readers who are interested in lives of Matthew, Elaine, or TJ this will likely be a much higher rated novel.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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Brain Droppings by George Carlin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"They say if you outlaw guns, only outlaws and criminals will have guns. Well, shit, those are precisely the people who need them."

Note to myself: Never again read a collection of George Carlin's musing on the trolley, when commuting to work! The trolley was quite crowded, only one available seat which I took, my co-passengers cramped and then I started exploding with laughter. I did everything to contain myself: to no avail! Poor people around me were stiff with fear of this giggling maniac in their midst.

Not everybody will like Mr. Carlin's humor: dark, cynical, deeply disappointed with the human species. George Carlin, famous for his "seven dirty words" routine, is one of the most influential stand-up comics of all time. Extremely opinionated and ruthless in his criticisms of all manifestations of human stupidity, hypocrisy, and evil:

"This species is a dear, hateful, sweet, barbaric, tender, vile, intelligent, confused, virtuous, evil, thoughtful, perverted, generous, greedy species. In short, great entertainment."

I am also opinionated and my opinions coincide with his in almost every aspect of his criticism of the human race. I am just thousand times less funny than he is and also I do not have the courage to express my opinions out loud. Take the epigraph quote about guns: why would any normal, average person need a gun? How would I ever use a gun in my life? I believe that only outlaws and criminals really need guns. I am certainly for outlawing guns for regular people.

Mr. Carlin is merciless particularly about us, the "Americans":

Traditional American values: Genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, hypocrisy, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods."

Also:

"The keys to America: the cross, the brew, the dollar, and the gun."

In addition to making bitter fun of people's fascination with violence, religion, sports, television, etc. the main target of Mr. Carlin's hard-hitting satire is the language. First, he attacks the various language inconsistencies, clichés, oxymorons, and redundancies, like in

"Unique needs no modifier. Very unique, quite unique, more unique, real unique, fairly unique and extremely unique are wrong, and they mark you as dumb. Although certainly not unique."

But it is the critique of euphemisms ("I don't like euphemisms. Euphemisms are a form of lying." Precisely!) and politically correct speech that is the most devastating. I do not have the courage to quote Mr. Carlin's musings in this area. But I certainly agree with him.

The reader will find some bittersweet humor, slightly tinged with melancholy, like in:

"There's an odd feeling you get when someone on the sidewalk moves slightly to avoid walking into you. It proves you exist. Your mere existence caused them to alter their path. It's a nice feeling. After you die, no one has to get out of your way anymore."

and also completely silly yet unbelievably hilarious quotes like

"One time, a few years ago, Oprah had a show about women who fake orgasms. Not to be outdone, Geraldo came right back with a show about men who fake bowel movements."

The reader will also find the famous monologue about "stuff" in its entirety.

George Carlin's Brain Droppings (1997) is the third most hilarious book I have read in my life (after Wstep do imagineskopii (not translated from Polish to English, and most likely untranslatable) and The Third Policeman . I am rounding the rating up. Yay!

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Conviction by Denise Mina
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Our stories weren't disguised curriculum vitae. We didn't tell them as a way of boasting or declaring our relative place in the social order. There was none of this crap. These were the stories to entertain, told for the shape of them, for the sake of them, for the love of a tale. It was all about the stories and the shape of the stories. Round ones, spirals, perfect arcs, a ninety-degree take-off with a four-bump landing [...]"

One of the most extraordinary books I have read in many years! Extraordinary not in the sense of uniformly excellent - oh no! Extraordinary as in "mostly a masterpiece, partly crap." (Sorry for the word, but it appears in the epigraph too.) I feel very strongly about the book and am unable to be balanced or dispassionate in this review.

I love Denise Mina's writing; she's one of my most favorite authors of all time. Having just finished reading her newest book - Conviction (2019) I love her work even more. To me one of the marks of great literature is that the writer does not pander to the public by giving them what they expect and want. Remember, it is the writer's art not the public's. When writers begins to cater to the public's wishes and reading habits they cease being artists and become craftsmen manufacturing replaceable items to order.

Conviction is totally unlike any previous novel by Ms. Mina (I have read them all). In the beginning I found it hard to believe she had written it and I was reading stunned and totally awed by a non-Mina (occasionally even anti-Mina) plot and prose.

A review requires at least a brief mention of the plot. Anna McDonald, a housewife, mother of two pre-teen girls, is married to a much older, successful lawyer. The author tells us that Anna has had a turbulent past and that McDonald is not her real name: I love it that we have to wait for the details until the midpoint of the book when we read:

"I have to explain who I am, where I come from, why I ran. [...] You will have been told this story before but only in one way and not in this way."

In the meantime, Anna, who is a fan of true-crime podcasts, is listening to the podcast Death and the Dana about a family dying in an explosion on a yacht named Dana, a famous and "cursed" boat. Anna realizes that she knows one of the victims. The Dana thread and Anna's past thread merge and the whole thing mutates into an insanely-paced thriller, which I find completely silly at the end. I am unable to treat the last part of the novel seriously - I think it is a parody or pastiche of popular thrillers, with all their clichés and idiocies.

Maybe I presume too much but I don't think that Ms. Mina wrote Conviction for the plot. Yes, a plot is needed to keep the readers reading, but here it serves just as a grounding for two powerful messages that the author conveys. One is about the art of storytelling. The stories are "told for the shape of them, for the sake of them, for the love of a tale." In this sense Conviction is really a metafictional novel. Ms. Mina is winking at us: I am feeding you crazy stories because I am writing about making crazy stories.

The other message is less veiled. The novel is a passionate and powerful critique of celebrity cult and the role that the so-called social media play in fostering the cult. The particular target is the "virality" of messages sent via, say, Instagram. The social media provide the global dish that feeds the viral information culture and kills the human culture.

I am also unable to refrain from quoting one of the funniest punch phrases I have ever read:

"For the rest of the journey, whenever there was a pause or the mood dipped, someone would repeat the punchline and everyone would laugh. This went on until the garroting in the toilet."

Four-and-a-half stars.

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