Feisty memoirs of a blazing youth in the theater and a slow evolution into an outstanding character actor. At age 24 Meredith (b. 1909) was hailed as the greatest young actor in the American theater for his performance in Maxwell Anderson's poetic drama Winterset (Anderson later wrote High Tor and The Star Wagon for him). But he has been around so long—more recent roles include the Penguin in the Batman TV series and Sylvester Stallone's aged trainer in the Rocky movies—that few readers or moviegoers under 40 have any idea that he was once the brightest light on Broadway, notorious for his inspired nuttiness. Meredith prefers to pass lightly over his awful childhood with an alcoholic father, but he still relishes the memory of his triumphant opening night in Winterset—as well as his equally overwhelming reception that night by Tallulah Bankhead, who met him stark naked at the door of her apartment in the Gotham Hotel, fed him cocaine, took him to bed, and at the critical moment pushed him aside. Meredith peaked early as Prince Hal in Orson Welles's Shakespearean history marathon Five Kings, though he stayed on top as a leading actor with the parts of George in Of Mice and Men and Ernie Pyle in The Story of G.I. Joe. He served in the Army Air Corps during WW II, was blacklisted in the '50s, and directed Zero Mostel in Ulysses in Nighttown during the '60s. Many of his tales involve his flirtatious wife, Paulette Goddard, as well as Charles Laughton, John Huston, Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Stewart, and his decades-long friendship with John Steinbeck. Charm by the buckets, with a bright eye and wicked brilliance.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-56717-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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