A little gem, but it’s excruciating to imagine paying the price for the material.
It all started with the Les Paul guitar he didn’t get for Christmas.
Sure, he didn't even ask for it, admits McSweeney’s contributor and Atlantic Records employee Kennedy, but that didn’t quell his disappointment. It was the first ticket to cool that never got punched except in his fantasies, which the author relates with cinematic clarity. It wasn’t his last disappointment, bad move, or crushed expectation. “I’m lying in bed feeling like blind optimism’s one-night stand,” confides Kennedy. Fantasy: he will be a smokejumper. Reality: “a caveman forest custodian cleaning up after it all.” Fantasy: he will operate an espresso franchise. Reality: he sucks nitrous oxide from the whipped-cream cans while hiding behind his espresso cart. “As days go by, incredible things are not happening”: Kennedy is hungry to break into the music scene, but his first gig is pulling records at a music warehouse. An alternative music man, he heads for Texas to make his mark . . . just as Seattle takes off. (“I’m still not catching on to the fact that I’m in the wrong spot at the wrong time.”) He actually manages to line up a show, but he can’t play his guitar and doesn’t know any music. He decides to move into advertising copywriting and approaches his job interviews with brio. At one agency, he is told they need a miracle worker. “ ‘Rock it up on,’ I blurted loudly and nervously, trying to muster some excitement and confidence. (Pause. He was just staring. I was very still, hoping the tongue-tied words would somehow disappear from the air between us.)” We’d guess it was his agent who did the talking on the book deal. It’s good to know who you are, and Kennedy does (check the title); he’ll have you laughing, simply glad you aren't him.
A little gem, but it’s excruciating to imagine paying the price for the material.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-61036-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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