A snappy, sensitive autobiography.
In this well-crafted debut memoir, Davis recounts his early life with an angry, drug-dealing father and comes to terms with the fact of his adoption.
“My earliest memory is of a gun,” the author writes. He was 5 years old in 1970s Brooklyn, and his parents’ regular fighting, he says, had escalated to the point that his father had put a gun to his mother’s head. This serves as a shocking, visceral opening to a tightly constructed memoir in which Davis contrasts his two father figures. He devotes Part I to the man that he grew up thinking was his father, a hot-tempered illegal immigrant from Argentina who worked as a butcher, cutting corners and playing cruel jokes on customers and employees. The author writes of times when he says his father locked him in a meat freezer or shut his fingers in a car window. Davis has a knack for re-created dialogue—especially his parents’ shouts, all in capital letters—and for alternately blunt and jarring chapter-opening lines. Aptly imitating a childhood perspective, Davis at one point remembers imagining “small devil horns” near his father’s hairline. Yet after his father served 11 years in Sing Sing for selling drugs, Davis—then an adult—wrote a letter pleading leniency to stop his deportation. Instead of depicting his parent as a total monster, the author acknowledges psychological nuances by pinpointing moments that show the man’s tender core, such as when he asked his sons repeatedly if they loved him or allowed John to teach him English pronunciation. In Part II, Davis tells how he learned, at age 34, that he was adopted. He then discovered that his biological father, a Milwaukee pizzeria owner and amateur musician who left when John was 18 months old, had recently died of cancer. If Davis’ adopted father is the book’s presiding demon, his biological one is the angel: he “has become a deity to me; an almost mythical figure,” Davis observes. By including only information about his fathers, the author keeps this memoir brief and focused. As a result, there’s remarkable thematic unity here rather than a misguided drive for comprehensiveness that one often finds in memoirs.
A snappy, sensitive autobiography.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4787-6419-9
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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