A lively, indulgent memoir.
A musician reflects on his career and experiences from the Depression Era through the present.
Hull brings to life his years as a big band leader and musician, starting with his youth in Bridgeport, Conn., where he was encouraged by a musical mother—a bandleader who eventually retired to raise her children. Strong memories include carrying his sax on the bus in a pillowcase—the family couldn’t afford a proper case—to go hear music locally, and hopefully be called on to play. He wasn’t. Undaunted, Hull starts his own band, plays with others and goes to college. He gets married and has eight children along the way, though the marriage eventually ends in divorce after suffering through long separations due to Hull’s life on the road. He forms the Jazz Giants, who get a rare opportunity to play the 1962 Newport Jazz Festival—a high point in his career. Afterward, the band discovers the recording is of poor quality and plans for an album are scrapped. He meets famous people such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie and aspires to bigger fame. In the ’70s, he scales down to a lounge act of six people and gets into the Las Vegas scene by backing up Vic Damone with a string ensemble. Later in life, he produces cruise-ship shows. Eventually Hull’s son locates a CD from an Armed Services Radio recording of the Newport Festival via the Library of Congress. Although Hull presents a vividly described and engaging memoir, full enjoyment of the author’s adventures is somewhat hindered by the thought of his wife home alone raising eight kids. Also, he ends some chapters with alternate endings of how things might have been, then employs a “voice of conscience” to remind him to say what actually happened, which can be distracting. But Hull’s life is an interesting one, nonetheless.
A lively, indulgent memoir.Pub Date: April 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0981972787
Page Count: 290
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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