``I'm so old that when I order a three-minute egg here [at the Friars Club], they make me pay up front.'' Henny Youngman (Take My Wife...Please!: My Life and Laughs, 1972) is now 86 and still ``the King of the One-Liners,'' as he was dubbed by Walter Winchell (uh, some time ago). ``I don't have any enemies—I've outlived them all...Take my life, please. It's all been a big mistake. Even at 86, I still don't know what the hell happened.'' Now that Sadie, his wife of 57 years, is gone, Youngman is ready to tell stories he couldn't before. Born in London, he was raised in Brooklyn: ``I knew I was born to the stage when my first-grade teacher picked up my option for 26 weeks.'' His father was an opera buff, hounded him to practice his violin. His first job was fiddling to silent films in his uncle Morris's movie house—no pay, but he was fired anyway. For quick cash, he fiddled on the Staten Island ferry, began cribbing jokes from vaudeville comics. After forming his own band, he became a tummler (noisy emcee, gagster, scenic designer, electrician, busboy, schmoozer who danced and flirted with unattractive women) on the borscht belt in the Catskills: ``You schticked just to survive.'' Soon he found himself befriended by Milton Berle and doing insult humor to gangsters in speak-easies (``This place was so rough the hatcheck girl's name was Rocco''). Among his more dismal tales is one about mobster Waxey Gordon asking Youngman to hold his automatic pistol, then following a waitress into the Lido Venice's kitchen and raping her on the floor. Always a bum to his mother-in-law, Youngman went on to perfect the mother-in-law joke: ``I just got back from a pleasure trip. I drove my mother-in-law to the airport.'' No match for George Burns but socko about the laws of comedy and show-biz. Nice for shut-ins. (Eight pages of b&w photographs- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-07744-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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