Skip this one, unless you want to read Irene Cara’s musings on inner peace or Susan McDougal’s version of Whitewater.
What happens after your 15 minutes of fame?
Mick Foley, Irene Cara, Jim Wright—if you can’t place these names, you’re okay. They’re three of the once-famous people chronicled in this study of life after fleeting fame. Guinn and Perry (journalists with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Oregonian) pose some interesting questions: How does fame change a person? What is it like to go from stardom to—utter obscurity? Unfortunately, there are no satisfying answers here. One might expect a little history of fame; or some evidence that the authors had acquainted themselves with basic psychology; or a discussion of why fame is so important to the American psyche. But instead of an innovative analysis of life after fame, Guinn and Perry have simply cobbled together overly long profiles of a handful of once-famous folks. Each chapter tends to be the simple retelling of life-stories of people once but now forgotten. Those on Susan McDougal and Kelly Clarkson may come closest to satisfactorily addressing the topic of fame. McDougal found that, after she got out of prison and returned to small-town Arkansas, her life felt meaningless, so she returned to the public eye as an advocate for imprisoned women. Clarkson, the American Idol heroine, had wanted to be famous since she was a tiny tot, and, having achieved fame, she’s doing her fierce (and pathetic) best to hold onto it. Organization is also wanting. Chapters consist of a profile of an individual has-been followed by a chapter that tells part of the story of Melvin Dummar (the working-class guy who claimed Howard Hughes named him as an heir). It’s unclear why the authors devote half their text to Dummar, or why they spread his story out over the entire manuscript. Whatever the aim, the arrangement doesn’t work.
Skip this one, unless you want to read Irene Cara’s musings on inner peace or Susan McDougal’s version of Whitewater.Pub Date: March 3, 2005
ISBN: 1-58452-389-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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