The meandering, overly long autobiography of a gender-bending singer whose mercurial career doesn't warrant such an exhaustive catalog. But for a fluke hit on the soundtrack to the 1992 movie The Crying Game, Boy George's time has, by the hit parade stopwatch of pop music, long passed. With the help of journalist Bright, who is more ghost than writer, the singer of the trifling British quartet Culture Club has produced an account of the rapid rise and fall of his group and himself amid the decadent London club scene of the late '70s and early '80s. Constantly informed by the author's sexual orientation, this reads like a homosexual parody as it recollects the attire and style of each of its hundreds of flimsy characters. In between the numbing descriptions of bondage trousers and hennaed hair there are several funny and even tender moments. Boy George's upbringing in the working-class O'Dowd family produces some hilarious conflicts, and his failed romance with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss is still painfully close to the bone. One even gets the feeling that the reasons for the singer's battle with heroin are more interesting than first meets the eye. Culture Club's output, however, is insignificant in the canon of pop music, and Boy George's antics are tame by the standards of both his predecessors (David Bowie, Marc Bolan) and his successors (RuPaul, Madonna). Ultimately, his shallowness and excitability bury any vital signs beyond an occasional witty remark. Furthermore, for so emotional a personality, Boy George remains eerily unperturbed about the deaths of fellow club denizens who are falling victim to AIDS. This autobiography commits the worst crime its has-been subject can imagine: It's boring. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen) ($100,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017368-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
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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