Frothy observations on life and art by this singer-pianist going on his 27th consecutive year performing at New York City's Cafe Carlyle. Readers searching for basic biographic information should avoid this loose memoir, written with costume designer/novelist Mackintosh (Silk, not reviewed), that covers the high points in the singer's career and little else. Born in Danville, Ill., to an absentee coal-miner father and a mother who worked as a domestic, Short began his career as a child during the Depression playing old warhorses like ``Nobody's Sweetheart'' and ``Tiger Rag'' at local roadhouses. He left home for Chicago at the age of 12 to become a bar singer. After years singing in Hollywood and Paris, he settled in New York, working primarily in clubs and the occasional Broadway revue until 1968, when he began his long run at the Carlyle Hotel (``When anyone said the Carlyle, the name Bobby Short came to mind automatically,'' he brags). Short's encounters with the famous and near-famous are treated all with equal, brief mentions; there is hardly anything one can learn besides how charming or smartly dressed they all were (Prince Charles, not surprisingly, confided in Short that he enjoys the music of Kern and company over today's rock 'n' roll). Short notes the racism that he has encountered, but he seems to have sailed smilingly through it, while those searching for tidbits of his sex life will learn only that he was ``seeing Gloria Vanderbilt'' when he was invited to perform at the Nixon White House. ``I have always treasured my privacy,'' the singer confides, and he apparently has carried this credo over into his autobiographical musings as well. Pleasant gossip, bubbly as champagne, but falling far short of what it could be. (100 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-59564-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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