Still a hustler, still a salesman—and also a hell of a writer.
After serving time in federal minimum-security prison for stock fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes, Belfort offers another coarse, lively text as a companion to The Wolf of Wall Street (2007).
That unsavory bestseller chronicled the rise of a cocky thief who actually operated a bucket shop in Long Island, not lower Manhattan. This is about his fall. It’s also about money and sex, featuring erotic histrionics and rancid uxorious relations. The language is still nasty, the braggadocio intact. No lovable scamp, Belfort remains cunning and vainglorious, frequently mentioning the cost of his clothing and his furniture, sneering at the cheap shoes and Bic lighters of his federal captors. After all, he once had the mansions, the yacht, the money. But he confessed and became a cooperating informant. He ratted on friends and thieving comrades. He wore a wire. His new memoir is graphic, at once lowdown and over-the-top. Included is the collapse of his second marriage to “the Duchess of Bay Ridge,” a classic trophy wife he had bugged for his own reasons. He got engaged to Miss Soviet Union. He dallied with a “self-proclaimed Jewish blow-job queen” and dabbled in what he calls “model-mongering.” He jumped bail and broke his cooperation agreement by taking an ill-fated trip to Atlantic City with an underage “model.” Withal, his love for his two children remained. In reward for his cooperation he served less than two years. In the Big House he bunked with Tommy Chong, who guided him in the craft of authorship. Chong, whose sincere, flaky memoir (The I Chong, 2006) is half as long as his student’s, apparently forgot to impart the rule of Less is More.
Still a hustler, still a salesman—and also a hell of a writer.Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-553-80704-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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