Best read as an antidote to the usual Morrison hagiographies by adoring critics.
A memoir of a tempestuous affair between a young art student and a tortured rock god.
Huddleston (Creative Writing and Integrated Arts/California State Univ., Monterey Bay; This Is the End, My Only Friend: Living and Dying with Jim Morrison, 1991) returns to the subject of her first book: her intimate relationship with the Doors’ singer and leader. The perspective of 40 years since Morrison’s death has stripped the author of some of her delusions of youth. Still, apparently relying on diaries from the era, she captures the fresh confusion of emotions she felt each time her path crossed his during their four-year relationship. As an 18-year-old, she harbored the very square fantasy of marrying her lover/idol, a fantasy she knew to keep to herself; she knew he had a longtime relationship with Pamela Courson (whom she identifies only as “Pam” in the book). Huddleston eventually learned that her own relationship with Morrison was in fact far from unique and meant nowhere near as much to him as it did to her. If there’s an added value to the book for Doors fans, it may lie in the author’s vivid portrait of the mercurial Morrison, whose persona could metamorphose from that of a vulnerable little boy to a sexual sadist in a matter of seconds. Readers will catch on fairly quickly that Morrison was never interested in Huddleston as much more than a sexual partner. From her first intimate encounter with him (which ended in a brutal anal rape) to the last some months before his death in Paris in 1970, she doesn’t get any closer to answering the question of who Morrison really was or why he was so psychically wounded.
Best read as an antidote to the usual Morrison hagiographies by adoring critics.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61374-750-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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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