A rock ’n’ roll fairy tale with a sunny, but gritty, heroine.
An irresistible memoir of one of the lesser lights of a major constellation of rock stars and their satellites.
Assisted by veteran co-author Ketcham (co-author, with William Cope Moyers: Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption, 2006, etc.), O’Dell discusses how her friends and lovers, as the subtitle of her book makes clear, included some of the most famous people of her generation. How did this girl from Oklahoma, by way of Tucson and Los Angeles, become a member of rock’s innermost circle, a singer on the chorus of “Hey, Jude,” the inspiration for songs by Leon Russell, George Harrison and Joni Mitchell and the sometime nemesis of Eric Clapton, lover of Russell, Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan? Her ascent was due partly to her being in the right place at the right time, an intrepidness that led her to fly, at age 20, to London to look for a job at the Beatles’ Apple Records, and a talent for knowing how to give people exactly what they wanted without getting in their way. “I was adept at dealing with famous people with complicated egos,” she writes. “I wasn’t afraid of them or overawed by their stardom. I could see the person behind the cloak of fame, but—and this was key—I never, ever forgot that the cloak was there.” A fixture on the Rolling Stones’ notorious 1972 tour in support of Exile on Main Street, after a few years she was managing major tours herself—she was probably the first woman to do so—including Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975. O’Dell provides valuable inside information about the landscape of ’70s rock, but she also looks at the complicated relationships at the center of Pattie Boyd’s Wonderful Tonight (2007), a collaboration between Boyd, Harrison, Clapton and Starr and his wife. Though the chronology takes bigger jumps over the years in the later chapters, the book also chronicles the author’s triumphs over addictions to alcohol and cocaine and her safe landing as a mother and hypnotherapist/drug counselor in Tucson.
A rock ’n’ roll fairy tale with a sunny, but gritty, heroine.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9093-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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