House doesn’t take himself, country music or his book too seriously. Pass.
A veteran country broadcaster mixes memoir with anecdotes and corny jokes.
House, a nationally syndicated country DJ, has also written more than 40 songs recorded by country artists and has supplied jokes and scripts for numerous country awards shows. In the incestuous world of country music, he’s a well-connected member of the family, and he shares some tales here that he never could on air (including one about Waylon Jennings driving with two kinds of blow). The author also tells some apocryphal tall tales—one about a roadie and another about a conniving couple named Buddy and Julie, apparently no relation to the Millers, recording artists who are married. “Nearly everyone I know in the music business is nice,” he writes, and he’s nice in turn to almost everyone, including Garth Brooks (“a genius at marketing [who] has figured out how to sell the same twenty songs over and over in different packages”), Kenny Rogers (“the Kenmeister”), Pam Tillis (“supernaturally talented”), Ray Stevens (another “genius”) and the Oak Ridge Boys (“unique and wonderful people—gentle, caring and fascinating. And they are stunning showmen”). House also discusses Taylor Swift, who was initially so appreciative but then once gave him the brush off. He also doesn’t much care for Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks—though few country insiders do. A typical passage: “Tanya Tucker has no editing button. If it occurs in her head, it’s gonna come spilling out her piehole. I think she’s hilarious because of that one fact. She’s also hell on wheels.” A typical joke: “I always think of Dolly [Parton] whenever I visit the Great Pyramids. I don’t know why, I just do. They’re enormous. The pyramids, that is.”
House doesn’t take himself, country music or his book too seriously. Pass.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-939529-90-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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