Heartfelt and capably written, but a distinctly minor contribution to mob lit.
Or, Papa was an Al Capone.
Roy DeMeo was not a nice man. A loan shark and auto thief, he graduated to contract murder in the 1970s, becoming a capo of the Gambino family and racking up a toll of more than 200 victims. Yet, in the eyes of his young son Albert, “No one could have asked for a better father than mine. . . . He could pick me up and throw me around as effortlessly as a cotton ball, and he often did. . . . I wasn’t exactly sure what my father did for a living, and I didn’t care. I just liked being with him.” Gradually, he acquired more than a few inklings of what his father did in fact do for a living: the expensive gifts and $100 bills at his first communion and the looks of fear on neighbors’ faces eventually tipped Albert off, and adolescence brought more than the usual amount of rejection of the previous generation’s mores. After his father died—“shot seven times in the face and hands,” a helpful policemen tells Albert’s mother—and his old crew moved in to divide the spoils, Albert began to look more closely into his father’s life, seeking some explanation for who murdered him and why. Pressured by federal agents to cooperate in their investigation and turn informant, hounded by mobsters fearful that he would do just that, 18-year-old Albert developed bleeding ulcers and a profound dislike for the Mafia. Some of what he reveals in this so-so memoir will be of interest to students of organized crime, but there are many better insider accounts available; and while writing it must have been a cathartic experience, the reader will not forgive such mawkish moments as when Albert puts on a pair of his father’s old shoes and concludes, “I had my own shoes to wear, my own journeys to take.”
Heartfelt and capably written, but a distinctly minor contribution to mob lit.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0679-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
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