An absorbing exploration of one of America’s most popular, and dangerous, sports that will be most appealing to NASCAR fans.
NASCAR legend Waltrip (DW: A Lifetime Going Around in Circles, 2004) takes us onto the track, into the pits and behind the scenes of his racing career.
The author—a three-time winner of the NASCAR Series Cup and winner of the 1989 Daytona 500, a race he describes as NASCAR’s “Super Bowl”—was in the broadcast booth for the 2001 edition, cheering on his younger brother Michael, the eventual victor. That victory was overshadowed, however, by the death of driver Dale Earnhardt in a final-lap crash, and Waltrip’s chilling description of the race and its aftermath are the entry point into an exploration of the author’s life behind the wheel. The majority of the book covers ground familiar to readers of his previously published autobiography, including youthful car chases with the police, triumphs and failures on the track and his discovery of religious faith. Waltrip pays particular attention to his relationships with other drivers including Earnhardt, Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough, and how their battles on the track often spilled into their personal lives. The author also provides some fascinating background history on racing at Daytona, again emphasizing the dangers faced by the drivers, and the many injuries and fatalities that have taken place there and elsewhere on the racing circuit. In the end, Waltrip argues that only the death of the sport’s greatest star, Earnhardt, led to changes in NASCAR’s attitude to safety, and even then it took strong pressure from him and others to force the adoption of stronger measures by a culture that prizes the recklessness of its heroes.
An absorbing exploration of one of America’s most popular, and dangerous, sports that will be most appealing to NASCAR fans.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4489-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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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