Self-absorbed and tortuous.
Can an American-born Englishman with blond hair go to Spain and find fulfillment as a flamenco guitar player?
That’s one of the questions posed by debut author Webster, and the predictable answer is that it may take immersion in a “flamenco lifestyle” that includes the assimilation of some Andalusian gypsy lingo, philosophy, mannerisms, and, perforce, months of association with the likes of car thieves and drug dealers. For good (or ill) measure, throw in a hit-and-run affair with an older woman, wife of the man who is charitable enough to employ you, thus funding your guitar lessons. There is no clock running in this hazy memoir, but it seems that in an amazingly short time Webster becomes proficient enough to sit in as an accompanist with a loose troupe of flamenco singers and dancers who are, by his own sad estimation, “good enough to play for tourists.” He exists nightly in the lower realm of this company, since creeping paranoia (perhaps enhanced by cocaine) convinces him that his blond locks make him an unwitting tourist attraction within a tourist attraction. One wonders, at least briefly, how this could happen to someone so inspired by the concept of duende, the elusive, transitory, sometimes orgasmic state that occurs when flamenco performers get grooved and surpass themselves. To his credit, Webster eventually discovers that duende can sometimes happen offstage, in a glance or an expression or the barrel of a gun, as well as in the ear of the beholder, and he finally reasons that without 20 years of practice and the genius he lacks he won’t be able to produce it on a flamenco guitar. But, perhaps . . . as a storyteller? Bad news there, too: Webster’s readers may find that they share the fate of a local gypsy whose tattoo proclaims: “Born to suffer.”
Self-absorbed and tortuous.Pub Date: March 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-1166-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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