An overly detailed biography that Lee’s die-hard fans will welcome.
The sad, troubled life of the popular jazz singer.
Peggy Lee (1920-2002), born Norma Deloris Egstrom, grew up in North Dakota, raised by an alcoholic father and mean stepmother. Yearning to be the center of attention, she wanted to be a movie star. By the time she was 15, she realized that her natural singing talent might get her out of the prairie. “She would have done anything to become famous,” a friend told music journalist Gavin (Deep in Dreams: The Long Night of Chet Baker, 2002, etc.). The author’s research is impressive: He has interviewed scores of people who knew Lee, worked with or for her, or witnessed her performances; he cites and assesses songs she recorded, performed and wrote; he follows her love affairs, however brief, and her four brief marriages. What he learns, however, proves repetitious: She was a vulnerable woman so frightened of performing that she downed a considerable amount of cognac before sweeping on stage; soon, alcohol was supplemented with Valium and Quaaludes. She was a demanding, selfish employer. She was deeply lonely. Her musicians, Gavin was told, “were her family….She kept them from leaving her after each show, which caused some problems with those who had wives or a life and didn’t want to hang out until the early morning hours.” On stage, she won praise for her “economy of movement.” She explained her stillness: “I just stood there because I was too scared to move.” She admired Billie Holiday, but the feeling was not mutual. She was a hypochondriac and a devotee of the Church of Religious Science, and she tried all manner of fad diets in an attempt to control her burgeoning weight. Her career had its ups and downs: Some of her songs—“Fever,” for example—made her famous, but some flopped.
An overly detailed biography that Lee’s die-hard fans will welcome.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1451641684
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
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