Enough already.
Slapdash account that adds a few grains of new information to the Monroe file with transcripts of tapes the actress made for her psychiatrist.
Boasting the dubious distinction of participation in both the Monroe and the Kennedy industries (The Men Who Murdered Marilyn, 1997; Vendetta: The Kennedys, 1993, etc.), Smith obviously has no problem with beating a dead horse. The tape transcripts run for just a few pages and reveal little of significance, and before even turning to those monologues the author devotes half his narrative to rehashing the details of Monroe’s death. Agatha Christie herself would have been challenged to connect the dots of the evidence at the scene. Jars of pills by the bedside first stood empty, then filled. The bedroom first looked neat and orderly, then chaotic, with papers strewn about. A washing machine hummed in the background—someone washing away evidence, perhaps? Smith does not believe her psychiatrist and the Kennedys killed Monroe, as others have claimed. Instead, he suggests the culprits were CIA operatives eager to topple a political dynasty by setting up the star’s death as a Kennedy plot. The idea seems plausible, though Smith builds his thesis on a stack of ifs, maybes, and might-have-beens. As for Monroe’s tapes, they cover such unedifying topics as taking enemas and having sex with Joan Crawford, plus a few predictable comments about working with Laurence Olivier (“a great, great actor”) and the peculiar remark—perhaps Monroe was just being funny—that the Bible is “a good script.” The repetitious, disorganized text contains glaring factual errors (Garson Kanin, not George Cukor, directed My Favorite Wife; Judy Garland was a young teen in the 1930s, not the 1950s) and enough grammatical howlers to give an English teacher a migraine.
Enough already.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1380-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
