PG-rated autobiography of a young man's coming-of-age in a black Baltimore ghetto. Journalist Wickham (USA Today, Gannett News Service) was orphaned in 1954 at the age of eight when his father shot his wife to death before turning the gun on himself. That grim scenario sounds like the perfect beginning for a story about a young man's descent into crime, pimping, and drug dealing, but Wickham sidestepped all those things. While he was certainly traumatized by the deaths of his parents, the story of his childhood and adolescence is squeaky-clean; it sometimes reads like a black American Graffiti. Wickham looks back with tender hindsight, little anger, and a great deal of self-knowledge, emerging from the shadow of his early misfortune as a fairly typical kid going through fairly typical teenage stuff: He agonizes endlessly about how to kiss his first girlfriend; he tries out for sports teams; he just says no to drugs and alcohol. A single trip to the police station for extorting quarters from fellow students convinces him crime is a losing proposition, and he soon becomes a caddie at Woodholme, a Jewish country club that for a time provides him with an emotional center, money, and a measure of self-esteem. Throughout, he is helped along by older black (and white) folks who try to steer him on the right path. Indeed, Woodholme constitutes a good argument for the effectiveness of the black community's ``extended family,'' in which neighbors and teachers assume the role of absent parents. The book ends with the 17-year-old Wickham joining the Air Force after fathering an illegitimate daughter. He vows to earn his GED and to support his child and his future wife, and you don't doubt that he will. Ultimately inspiring and refreshing precisely because of the absence of the guns/dope/sex sensationalism we've come to expect from such books.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-29283-3
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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