Two celebrated biographers lend their diligence to this dense, insightful work on a much analyzed icon. Sperber (Murrow: His Life and Times, 1986) had spent seven years researching and completing a manuscript when she died in 1994; Lax (Woody Allen: A Biography, 1991, etc.) picked up where she left off. The resulting book is strong on original research (drawing on interviews with nearly 200 people, on film archives, and on Bogart's FBI file) and refreshingly free of worn Hollywood anecdotes and tired film analysis. Among other things, it reveals the depths of of imbalance in Bogart's seemingly successful family (his parents, a physician and an artist, were alcoholics, emotionally remote and violent-tempered), the excruciatingly long road to stardom at Warner Brothers (``even in A pictures, Bogart wound up in B roles'' early on), and the self-recrimination that followed his public apology for his political activity at the HUAC hearings. (The re-creation of red-scare fear in Hollywood is especially clear and full.) The reasons for Bogie's first two marriages are examined in depth (his first, brief marriage, to successful actress Helen Menken, appears to have been in part to advance his career), as is the sense of duty that tied him to third wife Mayo Methot after he fell in love with Lauren Bacall. Sperber and Lax need no devices (such as Jeffrey Meyers's parallel between Bogart and Hemingway, see p. 281) to define the actor. Here Bogart's words and actions explain him, revealing his psychology and his place in American popular culture. When he tells a friend that he chronically berates himself because ``I expected a lot more from me. And I'm never going to get it,'' he encapsulates his own outlook and screen persona, as well as the national self-doubt that was key to his success. Dramatic, historically informative, and elegiac, this exemplifies an honorable standard in the uneven world of film biographies. (40 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-07539-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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