Given the subject matter and the author, one expects so much more than is delivered.
Santoro (Stir It Up, 1997), who covers jazz and pop music for New York’s Daily News and The Nation, offers the first complete Mingus bio since the jazz legend’s death in 1979.
Mingus was larger than life itself. A big man physically, he was a swaggering tower of musical ingenuity and a mercurial, tempestuous personality. A key figure in post-bop, Mingus was one of the greatest bassists in the history of jazz, a brilliant composer and arranger who built on the innovations of Duke Ellington in his use of large ensembles (and the boppers in his play with form), while investing his music with a theatricality that few other musicians ever even attempt. For a guy who was often regarded as the possessor of a ferocious temper, he also inspired extraordinary loyalty, as Santoro’s book reminds readers. Based on over 100 interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, some of the most telling observations about Mingus come from men like Buddy Collette and Britt Woodman, who knew and loved him from their shared adolescence to his death. Certainly, as Santoro notes at the outset of this volume, Mingus had a “messy, sprawling life,” but a biography shouldn’t recapitulate those qualities and this one, regrettably, does. Santoro seems to think it necessary to recap every meal, every meeting, every rehearsal of Mingus’s life, mistaking exhaustiveness for insight. On the plus side, the author (a skillful music critic and a musician in his own right) is good at putting Mingus’s early years in L.A. in the context of that town’s vibrant, often underrated jazz scene, and its dark history of institutionalized racism. But too much space and time is taken up with canned cultural history that consists of machine-gun torrents of clichés and aperçus, spat out in generalizations that inadvertently obscure the context and chronology of Mingus’s career. And, frankly, there is a lot more of Mingus’s life than of his music in this book, much of it presented with a sort of unhealthy voyeuristic glee.
Given the subject matter and the author, one expects so much more than is delivered.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-509733-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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.
