An uneven combination of songs and prose that reflect lessons many self-help fans would appreciate.
Memoir of a substance-abusing singer-songwriter reveal a harrowing path to self-acceptance.
Poppy started his life tenuously. Born the last child to a mother who was warned not to have another, doctors waited on standby to perform a complete blood transfusion on the newborn. Poppy avoided the operation just as he has ducked the many threats to his life since, including a cliff-dangling car accident, a head injury that left him unconscious for two days with maggots tunneling into his wound, dementia and alcoholism. A singer-songwriter, Poppy begins with the lyrics to a song–a total of 28 compositions are interwoven throughout 13 chapters that chronicle the author’s unsteady journey. All the songs are included on a two CD set that accompanies the book. Using a pleasant, country-western-tinged voice to croon melodic tales of love and life, Poppy proves to be a much better singer than writer. His smooth tenor evokes emotions that are buried in his clunky, elementary prose. Songs such as “Shaky Ground,” with the lyrics “walking around on solid ground/the soles of my feet feeling every pebble / seems like I’m always on the decline winning life’s uphill battle,” neatly illustrate core issues that take him several chapters to tediously explain. Despite many grammatical and spelling problems, the essence of Poppy’s triumph over a cycle of abuse and destruction shines through. Saddled with an abusive alcoholic father, the author gradually repeats the pattern laid out for him until winding up a homeless drunk. Plagued by dementia and three ex-wives, Poppy enters psychiatric rehab though adult-protective services. In an attempt to break free of his stifled life, he heads to Amsterdam and starts writing poetry. There, the creatively energized Poppy enters a songwriting contest and garners first runner-up. This, along with the pride he feels for the accomplishments of his daughter, are the simple joys of his life. Although filled with many instances of sadness and pain, there are few traces of regret or bitterness in Poppy’s account. He’s grateful for life itself, and his sincerity overshadows the limits of his writing.
An uneven combination of songs and prose that reflect lessons many self-help fans would appreciate.Pub Date: June 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4196-8244-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
