Hagiographic pieces that never quite coalesce into a book that matches the author’s ambitions.
A journalist’s obsession with his subject is renewed.
As a scrawny runt who suffered bullying, Miller (The Tao of Bruce Lee: A Martial Arts Memoir, 2000, etc.) took inspiration from his idol, Muhammad Ali, to gain the confidence to defend himself, and he maintains that “my admiration for him saved my life.” As a writer, he not only found in Ali his “muse and mentor,” but he also discovered the subject that would continue as his obsession for his professional life: in books, newspaper and magazine articles, as the boxing editor for Sport magazine, and in presentations he would give as someone who had become unusually close to Ali and stayed close during his ongoing battle with Parkinson’s and his spiritual journey. One of his main revelations—voiced twice in the book in exactly the same words—is “how the young Ali’s seemingly endless energy had promised that he would never get old, and how in many ways he is now older than just about everyone his age.” Readers see both sides in descriptions of famous fights and in intimate visits after Ali’s retirement, when he remained more playful and engaged than accounts that would reduce him to his disease might suggest. The author wants to set the record straight about his hero, but he reveals more about himself than about his subject—and about the hero worship that is practically a religion with him, as Ali is depicted as rarely less than a saint and more like a god. “Ali has been the most reliably large planet in my solar system, the astronomical constant,” writes Miller, who recognizes the fortuity of his relationship with the Champ but who insists that Ali treats everyone the same.
Hagiographic pieces that never quite coalesce into a book that matches the author’s ambitions.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63149-115-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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