A very much less than definitive biography of one of our greatest jazz performers. Clarke (editor, The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music) relies heavily on interviews conducted in 197073 by Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who apparently hoped to write a biography of Holiday (she died before she could complete her work). Holiday's (191559) life story is well known, and Clarke does an adequate job of tracing her rise and fall, from her illegitimate birth in Baltimore and her reform-school years through her stormy reunion with her natural mother, who may also have served as her part-time pimp. Holiday showed a natural talent for singing and was soon working the after- hours clubs. By the mid-'30s, she was recording with legendary pianist Teddy Wilson and touring with Count Basie and Artie Shaw. Her greatest years were few, however, due to her proclivity for abusive relationships (with a series of male managers who also served as lovers, drug dealers, and ``financial managers'') and her growing dependence on heroin. Clarke traces her decline through the '50s, sparing no details of her increasingly erratic behavior. While he obviously idolizes Holiday, Clarke is fairly evenhanded in his descriptions of the musicians and lovers who were part of her life, although his dislike for famed producer John Hammond (whom he contemptuously calls ``one of the great white gods'' of the music industry) is evident. Clarke's analysis of Holiday's recordings are filled with clichÇs (``The music in Heaven is like this'') and such ham-fisted assertions as his suggestion that Holiday achieved the status of a Christian icon, ``an image of something sacred...because she was granted Grace.'' Surely, the greatest voice in jazz deserves an equally compelling biography; for now, her own Lady Sings the Blues, although deeply flawed in its factual account, remains the best introduction to her life and work. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-83771-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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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