This is more of a love letter than “Daddy Dearest” but also more about a flawed human being than about a band that has...
The author tries to connect with the famous father she never knew in an account that is most illuminating when she’s telling her story and that of her mother.
When Duane Allman (1946–1971) died in a motorcycle accident, “he was twenty-four years old and I was two,” writes the author. “We never had the chance to know each other.” In fact, the virtuosic guitarist and founder of the Allman Brothers Band had already separated from the author’s mother, whom he had never legally wed, and was with another woman who initially claimed to be his common-law widow. The vast majority of this narrative covers decades when the author wasn’t even alive, which doesn’t prevent her from re-creating situations and dialogue and even asserting what her father was thinking long before he was her father. She had help, of course—access to her mother and other family, friends and members of the band, as well as interviews with those whose recordings Allman’s guitar had graced (Boz Scaggs, Bonnie Bramlett, John Hammond and others). Her uncle Gregg, who has written his own best-selling musical memoir, was also generous in his memories, though, as the author admits, “I was in my thirties before I started reaching out to him.” And there are dozens of letters, from her father to her mother and others. “I dreaded pursuing this story as a reporter would, by asking uncomfortable questions and following every lead,” writes the daughter whose bond with her father runs deep and whose love is abiding but who had to face some uncomfortable truths about “his arrogance and dark moods….Duane could be so cold and crass,” as a man who succumbed to drugs, groupies, and other temptations of the road and frequently risked death before his accident killed him at his musical peak.
This is more of a love letter than “Daddy Dearest” but also more about a flawed human being than about a band that has persevered for decades after its founder’s death.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6894-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
