Overlong but still packed with great lines, vivid anecdotes, and plenty of photos. Certainly a treat for his many fans.
Everything you ever wanted to know—and more—about hyperliterate songwriter and performer Costello.
It becomes immediately clear in this voluminous debut memoir that Costello’s prose cuts with the same spiky wit and observational power as his well-known lyrics—e.g., upon meeting Bruce Springsteen: “he laughed like steam escaping from a radiator.” What this memoir could’ve used was a more proactive editor to rein in its disjointed structure and rambling eccentricities. In one chapter, we learn about Costello’s 20-something rise to stardom in 1977; the next chapter covers his birth. Readers will need to forget trying to follow this memoir in a chronological way, which may be appropriate when considering his unconventional songwriting. Whatever the Byzantine structure, certainly there’s no part of his life left untouched—from his childhood growing up in Liverpool and London watching his father perform as a singer with the Joe Loss Orchestra to getting his first band together and on to becoming the jittery 1970s New Wave answer to Bob Dylan. Although Costello (born Declan MacManus) led a routine, working-class existence in his teens and early 20s, not surprisingly, the most scintillating time in his life to read about is his unlikely rise to fame in the ’70s with his band the Attractions and Stiff Records. Costello isn't coy when discussing the origins of his songs and detailing the often surprising musical influences behind them. His writing on his later elder statesman years—including his marriage to Diana Krall and his dabbling with string quartets and orchestras—is pleasantly informative, but his discussions of his middle ages are mostly akin to reading someone’s CV. They lack the same thrill of youth that drives the recollection of his hand-to-mouth days as a struggling punk.
Overlong but still packed with great lines, vivid anecdotes, and plenty of photos. Certainly a treat for his many fans.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-16725-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
PROFILES
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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