A wide-ranging biography and social history examining the years in which Mae West the woman became Mae West the theater and movie star and cultural icon. It's a mark of how definitive a character Mae West was that even people who have never seen one of her movies are likely to know what she looked liked and how she talked, and to know one or more of her most famous quips. In this new biography Leider demonstrates that this character was the work of a woman who painstakingly reinvented herself over a long career, starting as a child performer at the turn of the century and on into an extensive period in vaudeville, burlesque, and finally Broadway, where she wrote and starred in the plays that defined Mae West for America. This period in West's life remains little understood, and Leider brings vividly to life the young entertainer, as well as the entertainment world in which she moved. But Leider also widens her focus to detail the cultural history of the period, showing how changes in social and sexual mores affected West and how she, in turn, affected them. There are some narrative infelicities: The sequence of events is occasionally jumbled, and Leider is prone to show off her research with long lists of almost random details. And Leider (California's Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times, 1991) believes that after censors effectively ended West's film career at the end of the '30s, little she did was worthy of note. Thus she disposes of the last 40 years of West's life in an 8-page epilogue. But for the most part this is lively, incisive reading. A vibrant story of a star's life and times—not just for the movie buffs. (photos)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-10959-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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